thanks for letting me know ,Zagor and DavidR, i was in fact thinking about using the on demand Bit Defender version, which i already downloaded yesterday, and will install as soon as i've sorted out things with avast in this pc.
Fact is i have Sygate Pro here and the famous IE & FF habit of going out without a notice with Sygate and a local proxy (Web Shield) is worrying me a bit.
I'm actively searching the pages of this forum in order to study the matter (i noticed Jarmo P ,who i often met at sygate forum,is active here,'Hello,Jarmo')
I hope not to go off topic ,but i still do not understand if disabling the Web shield would entail losing such a great protection or not, having all remaining providers enabled.
After all what really should matter, for the relative protection offered by ANY antivirus heuristic-proactive system , should be the resident scanning monitor,here at Avast named the Standard Shield, am i right?
If i could lightheartedly disable the Web shield,i'd have solved my firewall problems and at the same time made Avast a bit lighter.
Any views?