Removing Avast-Antivirus. Stubborn Uninstall

A friend of mine installed Avast- Antivirus Free on his computer and decided to use another antivirus program so he tried to uninstall Avast. It wouldn't let him uninstall it. He was using Windows 7 so he went to the Control Panel and chose Programs > Uninstall a program and clicked Avast and then clicked Uninstall. It started the uninstall process but froze after about 5%. After waiting for a few hours he realized it was frozen and called me. I started to do the same thing he had already done several times and got the same result. Shocking! Then I went into the Avast settings > Troubleshooting and unchecked the box for <Enable Avast self-defense module>. This is a feature that prevents malware or viruses from disabling Avast and removing it so it can infect the system.

I tried to uninstall it again with no luck. Same result.

Next, I downloaded and ran the Avast uninstall utility AwsClear. This is a utility that Avast has to uninstall Avast when it is being stubborn. It got to the same point and froze.

After doing some more research I determined that I was going to have to uninstall Avast manually. This is probably not the best way because you can cause more trouble than you fix by deleting registry entries but I backed up the registry and went to work trying to delete program folders and registry entries. Some of them were stubborn and I had to start deleting files one by one as I was not allowed to delete the entire Avast program folder at once. Several restarts were needed.

Eventually I was able to get rid of Avast on this particular computer and my friend was happily surfing the internet and playing his games again.