1. Having clicked on "Create on USB", I was rewarded by the Avast dialogue panel turning completely white, and with the "windows not responding spinning cursor"
2. Task Manager also reported Avast as not responding, but clued by a very occasional flash of the drive light, I left it alone.
3. Nearly 10 minutes later, the dialogue returned, and said it was going to download the toolkit. That download took another 29 minutes (and I'm on high speed cable).
4. Finally it told me I had a rescue USB device.
5. Booted up, selected the rescue USB flash drive from the boot menu, and was rewarded with "Reboot & Select Proper Device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a Key", and no way could I get it to accept the rescue as valid boot media
I have repeated the above several times, and the results bad as they are, are consistent.
I can make a Paragon recovery USB flash drive in a fraction of the time it takes to make the Avast one, and it works. I can also make an entire partition image using Paragon in less time that it takes to do the above. The Paragon recovery flash drive (made on the same Flash drive that had been used for the Avast recovery, after reformatting) works from the same USB socket, selected from the same boot menu.
I am using the latest avast 2014.9.0.2007. It was done as a clean installation after a complete uninstall of the previous version (2006), and clean up using both the Avast uninstall tool (Avastclear.exe) from safe mode, and RejZoR's Avast Cleanup Tool.