I'm a long time user of Avast, until 6 months ago. It then started to behave weirdly, loosing my Resident Protection randomly. Since Avast 4, it has gone sour, each time customer service is bad and you take litteraly your hair out of your head making the software work on your pc. For them, it's not their software, it's your PC. So guess what??? I'm leaving the boat, an AV is far too important to loose your head on installation problems. A good Firewall and a good AV is all I need and they shouldn't be a cause to torment me.
look, I had to do an install from scratch from V7 final, and it's been running perfectly fine since then. We're running the same OS, Windows Seven 64 bit. So what's going wrong on yours ... honestly I have no idea precisely ... don't know if you upgraded from V6 , and I'm aware there are huge upgrade problems .... otherwise .. You're saying:
A good Firewall and a good AV is all I need
... and I'm seeing in your sig that you run a bunch of more or less useful security software:
MBAM ON ACCESS,SASfree, Sandboxie3.62,HITMAN PRO,Windows Firewall Control + Win7 FW, FF10.0b4 HJThis2.04,WOT-SA-AVGLinkScanner,Winpatrol
... I mean what do you expect, no problem
>>> oh forgot to mention, V7 runs fine here, and apart from AIS, there's nothing else (security related) running.