UPDATE:
Hi guys, an update...woke up this morning and for the hell of it, decided to try a "Last Known Good Config"....it WORKED! I somehow was able to boot into Windows normally! First thought was "get Avast Uninstall tool and finish removing remnants of it"....which I did, however, clearly not thinking, the tool said it needed to run in Safe Mode and I thought "sure, that's fine"....stupid mistake, as when I rebooted and tried to go to Safe Mode, I got stuck back at the loading screen at "aswRvrt.sys" again...
Back to square one I guess.....going to try running through all the steps you've mentioned so far (use FRST to restore to the 9th again, use FRST to remove Avast from start-up, use FRST to remove Daemon Tools from start-up), and pray I can get it to boot back in again...if I can, instead of trying to run the Avast uninstall clean tool, I'll try running the normal uninstaller and see if that will work...