I used to have a memory leak with Avast when Kazaalite was running, but, that was traced to Windows Updates. At that time, Avast pulled more than 20,000K of memory while K-lite was using more than 18,000K. Took out Windows Updates, Avast memory use went down to
16,000K and K-lite down to 16,000K.
Here's the interesting note -- I uninstalled K-lite, then reinstalled, but I turned off all Avast providers while reinstalling K-lite. Avast memory use now is only between 12,000K and 16,000K and K-lite memory use is below 14,000K. No leaks, no freezes, no crashes.
Idling, my CPU is 0% and Avast is pulling less than
12,000K.
Try f's advice to uninstall and reinstall Avast (might want to reboot after uninstall). If that doesn't help, try uninstalling and reinstalling programs which may be using a lot of memory. This will sometimes solve some conflicts. (I'm putting Windows Updates back in over the weekend).
Dave