OK, thank you both, that answers how to turn the services off for good, although it's a bit more drastic than I had hoped - I might want to turn them on occasionally. But I'd really like to know why they do that. I'm almost certain this didn't happen with Avast Free 2015 but only started with the 2016 version. I don't see any other complaints about this, so is it something peculiar to my system, or has nobody else noticed it, or do they just live with it? I don't like this behavior - user options should stay where the user wants them, especially when the program give no indication that it intends to later alter them whenever it feels like it with no warning.