Same exact thing here. extremely annoying and fucking dangerous from a privacy perspective, especially for those such as myself who live in a country where you need a VPN to access the internet and viewing the wrong political opinion can get you a visit by police. Seriously F Avast for not looking into this. In the middle of browsing the system proxy resets with zero warning unmasking all your traffic and preventing access to western websites. Windows and Avast are both fully updated. Avast is reset, IE settings reset, network settings reset. I've reset everything and the issue persists. The only option I have is to uninstall Avast because this behavior is far more dangerous than the low risk of malware.