hi Abigman,
'Tis the learning curve you are going through. Computers are much more complex in the way they operate and run than by just simply turning them on would imply.
Sometimes this complexity can be a bit overwhelming. So, there are programs that look into that complexity and sometimes they report things that even baffle me for a while.
avast! introduced this feature for cases such as the McAfee meltdown where XP systems would not boot after being shut down for the night. This failure was traced to an error in the previous day's virus database update. Emergency Updater allows avast! to fix this issue as soon as they are aware of it, and thus minimize the impact of such an error. 'Pushing' out an emergency update means that no user interaction is required, all one needs to do is be connected at the time of the push. This feature will be used rarely, and only for situations such as the one that affected McAfee. It's the bug-fixer of all bug fixers, as it were.