There is no way to protect it with avast! at this point... there is simply no Azureus listen in the list of P2P programs inside avast! P2P provider.
I check everything manually... download files, and never ever execute anything without avast! checking it first. It's not a shortcut, but it works.
I just mentioned that I never ever had any problems with connection timeouts, and as I already mentioned to darth.mikey, a friend of mine who is my neighbour by the way, also uses Azureus with avast! installed, and he also never ever had any of those connection timeouts. Some people reported those problems, but I really have no clue why is that happening on their end while using Azureus.