About the two avast! balls dissapearing, I had the same problem but found out by myself that SUPERantispyware was preventing Avast! to start up, because SUPERantispyware has a scanner that prevents some programs to load at startup. I deleted SUPERantispyware, reinstalled Avast!, and all was well. If you have SUPERantispyware and have been having problems with Avast!, you might want to delete SUPERantispyware.