last night i finally upgraded to Avast 2016.11.1.2241 and instead of rebooting the PC i chose to shut it down..
today when i started it up i got the message that Avast is out of date... i left it for a good 30 minutes while i was troubleshooting an IPv6 routing issue and when i got back to Avast the same warning message was present. i tried to use update button in the settings interface... i even tried to modify avast via appwiz.cpl... same message remained...
in the meantime i solved the IPv6 routing issue i had and things were working correctly... except avast.. i had to reboot the pc for it... after reboot the avast updater worked normally as well..
so.. is the updater using IPv6 connections now? if so, i suspect that the IPv6 routing issue has somehow made the updater to stumble and freeze waiting for a broken IPv6 connection.
for information.. the IPv6 routing issue was that
http://ipv6.whatismyip.akamai.com/ worked properly but
http://ipv6.whatismyipv6.com/ was dropped somehow at the national ISP gateway... restarting the router a couple of times fixed the routing problem... but not Avast's problem... i had to restart the entire PC so that Avast can wake up and get its updates
for reference.. this is what the traceroutes looked like when the routing was borked:
>TRACERT.EXE -6 www.nasa.gov
Tracing route to iznasa.hs.llnwd.net [2a02:3d0:630:a000::e]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 2a02:2f0d:2251:3800::1
2 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 2a02:2f0d:1cf:ff00::2
3 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2a02:2f0d:4f:ff01::1
4 16 ms 16 ms 16 ms 2a02:2f00:8708:2:2:0:6:0
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * ^C
>TRACERT.EXE -6 www.yahoo.com
Tracing route to fd-fp3.wg1.b.yahoo.com [2a00:1288:110:2::4001]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 2a02:2f0d:2251:3800::1
2 4 ms 4 ms 3 ms 2a02:2f0d:1cf:ff00::2
3 2 ms 2 ms 1 ms 2a02:2f0d:4f:ff01::1
4 16 ms 16 ms 16 ms 2a02:2f00:8708:2:2:0:6:0
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * ^C
>TRACERT.EXE -6 www.google.com
Tracing route to www.google.com [2a00:1450:4017:803::2004]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 2a02:2f0d:2251:3800::1
2 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 2a02:2f0d:1cf:ff00::2
3 2 ms 2 ms 1 ms 2a02:2f0d:4f:ff01::1
4 16 ms 16 ms 16 ms 2a02:2f00:8708:2:2:0:6:0
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * ^C
>TRACERT.EXE -6 ipv6.whatismyip.akamai.com
Tracing route to a1524.i6g1.akamai.net [2a02:2f0c:8000:a::51c4:1ac1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 2a02:2f0d:2251:3800::1
2 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 2a02:2f0d:1cf:ff00::2
3 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2a02:2f0d:4f:ff00::1
4 5 ms 5 ms 4 ms 2a02:2f0c:8000:a::1
5 5 ms 4 ms 4 ms 2a02:2f0c:8000:a::51c4:1ac1
Trace complete.
