David - Thanks for your reply
Just to clarify - with Web shield active and when a virus warning message appears, the disconnect option is disconnecting what exactly ?
The reason for asking is that when I used the previous version and came across a virus warning, normally I would choose to "send to chest" and delete later. However there were increasing instances where choosing any option i.e. delete, repair, move to chest, rename etc would not work and an error message along the lines of "cannot delete the application is being used by another process"
However the error message would provide the location of the virus - usually within /temporary internet files/content.ie5/....... which would allow me to delete the offending file using command prompt outside of explorer.
So if these particular viral attacks circumvented the previous version of Avast is it not possible that they can also get around the new one ?