Richard thanks for responding. I do not know how to do most of the stuff you told me.
This thing is crazy, when I turned on the puter this morning, I had the same "Black Shield" and the constant popups "Do you want to continue to go unprotected". to which I keyed in "No". This went on last night for over an hour. Then suddenly the Black Shield was gone and the only thing I have is a "Red Shield" with a White X in the middle of it.
I did a Full Scan with Avast, it took over 1 hour to do it and it never finished. It hung up at 72% so I shut it down. Funny thing when I tried to reinstall the OS, it hung up at 27%. Strange that it has a hangup at exactly 100% total.
I am going to try to back up the puter to an earlier date and see if I can do that now. Not sure if my OS disc is damaged either.