support is a third party vendor hired by Avast?
That is correct. And there really many complaints about that company. They are only after your money and don't provide anything near what you can call service. My advice is to never call them again.
It seems their billing is a third party vendor also
Actually there are two. Digital River and Nexway. Both of these handle financial transactions for a huge amount of companies (small, medium, large) and can be fully trusted. If you ever have a problem with them, contact them and things will soon be solved in a decent way.
From what I've read here in the forum, no one in this forum is an Avast employee either?
I don't know what you have read, but that is wrong. There are avast employees active on this webboard from all kinds of departments. You can recognize them easy. They have "avast team" underneath their webboard name.
I don't have time to be patient while my new laptop is unprotected.
It doesn't have to be unprotected. You can put avast free on it. And don't worry, it is using the same database and detection as the paid versions.
and let the account expire
If you have money to waste, give it to me.
My experience is that avast will solve your problem, just have patience.
making sure I can not be billed again when it comes time to renew
You can do this by looking up your order and disable the auto-renew option.
Thank you for your attempt at assisting
No need to thank me. If I didn't wanted to do so, I would have not done it.
but it seems there's really nothing this forum can do to help with my problem, except advise.
Well I, as well as the majority of users here, are just like you a user of the avast software. We can't see/change the information/data that avast have of users. But some of us do know a lot about the avast products, how the company works, what to do when there is a problem and such. Besides the individual knowledge we have, never underestimate the power of the collective
If you post your ticket numbers here, I will try to have someone from avast to have a look at them.
I can't promise anything ofcourse, but my experience is that your problem will be solved soon.