AVG Free Ed. "crashed." Reinstall or what?

Overview:

I'm a big fan of AVG Free Edition, which has been working fine for
years. The other day, AVG Free Edition's Control Center reported on
component "Anti-Virus" that "Component is registered correctly;
however determining status failed with error code 0x81000002."

I'm running AVG-Free 7.5.476 over WinXP-Pro/SP2 (current with
Microsoft Update.)

Question:

Should I just uninstall AVG and then reinstall. Or do the following
symptoms (and possible cause of this "crash") suggest a different
course of action?

Details:

"Selected test" reported read-errors on a slew of things, e.g.
Partition table, Boot sector and the DLLs: kernel, user32, etc.
Also, AVG's icon in the System Tray was grayed out.

When I checked the AVG Control Center, I noticed that Resident Shield
was not loaded. I opened it's properties and, in the General tab, set
it to "Ignore faulty condition of the component." That restore the
AVG icon in the System Tray to normal colors, but Resident Shield
remain "not loaded."

I think the cause of all these problems was an action of mine as I was
restoring my system from hibernation. As the system was recovering,
I powered up an external hard drive (intending to back-up some files
to it when the system stabilized.) The external drive was off when I
hibernated.
--
Richard

WinXP-Pro/SP2, Ruby 1.8.2-15, Rails 1.1.6, Gem 0.9, MySQL 5.0.27-nt,
SciTE 1.72, FireFox 2.0.0.4, IE 7.0, OE 6.0, MS Office 2003 SP2,
Java JVM 1.5.0_11-b03, Apache Tomcat/5.5.12,
MSDevEnv 2002 v. 7.0.9466. .NET Frwk 1.0,
AVG-Free 7.5.476, Prevx1 2.0.2.23, Startup Cop Pro 2.03