Hello btnewman,

there is no such box to disable mandatory icons in Start menu and Taskbar (icons near clock). The installation was probably corrupted (by some conflict with other application or running it in uncommon way like "Run As Administrator" from right-click context menu) and I would recommend to reinstall AVG according to these steps.

In case the situation still persists, please gather AVG installation logs and MSinfo32 output, upload it in an archive(zip file) to favorite online storage and provide us with link to it, so we can analyze the situation.

Thank you