Well your system is well up to the task.
When the tray icon eventually appears, does it have an asterisk in a triangle over it ?
Is your Comodo Firewall the stand alone one, no AV or defence+ (or whatever it is called) ?
I'm going to have to call it a night after Midnight here and I'm up early.
Nope. Regular icon, and the changing from blue to orange animation. Yes my COMODO Firewall is the free/standalone version. Tried a lot of other stuff regarding this problem though, like allowing avast in firewalls, turning off firewalls, all that stuff... it makes no difference.
If you have a normal avast icon, then the shields should be started/running, otherwise you would see the icon in my image or a more severe one, avast tray icon with a Red Circle with an X over the top of it.
The fact that the avast tray icon is animated and rotating, indicates that it is doing its job, scanning. To do that the shields and avastSvc.exe (main avast service) need to be running.
At first I thought it was the virus definitions that were the culprit as I think with certain ones they change the way the shield and stuff behaves? I'm no technical expert so I don't know. I just know basic functions and such in Avast! But since I've been fresh installing the program it probably isn't, nor can it be the core files of Avast! as they're new.
The avast virus definitions update (controlled by instup.exe) is separate from the normal working of the scanners, so shouldn't effect the shields.
Even if there is a virus definitions update under way, any impact would be down to general slowness of the system, but the main avast service avastSvc.exe has a much higher priority. So I don't believe editing the .ini file would see any change in the issues you are describing.
I'm at a bit of a loss as to why you are seeing this if the tray icon is normal and rotating.
How/where exactly are you viewing that the shields are stopped ?