I can confirm this is indeed happening. I spent many useless hours reviewing code that was perfect, but it all suddenly stopped working, no matter which Web-browser I used.
At first I unwillingly suspected that I somehow broke the code. But it turned out that it was all failing thanks to Avast's recent update. The Web-shield was identifying Websockets as a security risk.
Seeing as web-socket is a new technology and many developers are now starting to learn about HTML5, I think this move will frustrate a LOT of people that will probably never figure this out and will likely blame it on browsers or their own code.
While I'm relieved to finally know what the heck was happening, I found it very troublesome that Avast didn't make it obvious that it was doing all of this behind the scenes.
If I -don't- want websocket, I'll use the latest public version Firefox or IE.
I honestly didn't like this move. I'll certainly be a lot more suspicious of Avast from now on.