AVG won't let you enter a new activation key

By Selwyn Polit, 25 August, 2021

Recently, one of my clients let their subscription to AVG anti-virus lapse and all 8 computers on their network were complaining about the subscription having expired.  I purchased a new license key and went about putting it into the AVG's that were running. Strangely, the field for the license number was grayed out so I couldn't paste it in. 

They are set up with the AVG admin console so I thought maybe that was the way to go.  There is a very clear sequence of steps outlined on a number of web sites.  I thought this was the clearest. I followed that procedure.  No luck. 

It turns out that if your license expires more than 15 days previously, AVG clients shut down and don't want to do much of anything.

A quick call to the very nice folks at AVG came up with a suggestion of deleting the avg.snu file in the programs/avg/2013 folder and then reopening the interface.  AVG nicely comes up and asks for the new key but seems a little confused and unable to verify that this is a valid license key.  The next step is running the add/remove programs (click start, run and type appwiz.cpl) - right click on AVG when the list populates and select change.  Then do a repair install of AVG.  The first thing it asks for is the new license key and it seemed happy to take it this time.

ok, rinse and repeat 8 times.  What fun.  I hope this saves someone some time.