I want to bump this to the top. I too had this problem slap me in the face tonight it's had me practically in tears trying to fix it. I really hope the devs fix it because I really don't want to change Antivirus providers :\
You start up Chrome and the web pane just sits here, the cursor has the usual windows spinning circle next to the arrow animation, but it never reaches a page. Not only does it not connect to the internet, LOCAL pages will not open which means you can't even get into Chrome's settings because it's all handled inside of the web pane.
Chrome's my favorite browser; Avast's my favorite AV but they won't play together. I can't even disable Avast somehow as far as I've found. So far stopping the shields does nothing, adding exclusions to auto sandbox and a few of the shields did nothing, I have to completely uninstall to fix this.
I thought at first I got some odd malware, or part of some because the marketing smart guys at the local newspaper's website are now pushing ads with malware in them. Avast caught it earlier. I'm afraid to even go read the online news paper now though, because I can't use Chrome with Avast installed and unless I pick up another AV package I have no AV protection in Chrome. Was there a program update recently I may have missed? I usually update as soon as I'm notified but this problem just cropped up tonight on... think it was .1456? In desperation, I installed the newest beta, which is .1461 and the problem is still not fixed. Like I said though, uninstall Avast and the problem disappears, and also it doesn't occur in safe mode and reinstalls of Avast and Chrome did not work, also a system restore before the problem ever happened didn't fix it either.
This problem is really killing me here please fix this Avast!