QUICK SOLUTION: Within Avast Cleanup, click on "Speed up" icon. Open "Background & startup programs". Scroll to the bottom of the list, find the green font that says "# programs sleeping" and click on it. Find your program on the list and click "wake". If it's not on the list, see an Alternate temporary work-around in the next paragraph:
ALTERNATE SOLUTION: Solution to get programs running but keep it otherwise under "sleep" mode in Avast (I had to do this with my university's VPN service which Avast constantly shutdown...after 8 hours of troubleshooting I figured it out) *****(NOTE: This is just a temporary fix-action, but won't change the Avast Cleanup setting of putting the program to sleep afterwards. You will have to repeat this temporary fix-action on every login/user session when you want to use the program. In my case, if I did not do the settings change within Cleanup itself (see QUICK SOLUTION) then it would shutdown my VPN after 2 minutes of it running):
1. Run Task Manager as ADMINISTRATOR.
2. Once Task Manager opens, go to "Startup" tab and locate your program. Check the status, it should say "Disabled". Right click and hit "Enable". You can close this window.
3. Now, open Services as ADMINISTRATOR
4. Locate your program in the list and in the "Startup Type" column you should see "Disabled" and the column left to that (Status) should be blank.
5. Right click, hit "Properties". In the first tab that you'll be sent to ("General") you'll see in the middle of the window "Startup type:" and a drop-down menu. It should be showing "Disabled". Click on the drop-down menu and select "Automatic". Hit "Apply " button in the bottom right corner, then "Ok" to close the window.
6. RIGHT CLICK on the program in the Services list once more! And select "Start" (If you don't do this, it still won't run. Because up to this point you have only changed the Startup settings, but have not enabled it to run in this open user session). Once you hit Start a window will pop up and then close, and voila. You're running.
You should now be able to run your program. If you have issues while running the program again, run Services as an Administrator and when you right click once more on the program you'll see action buttons "Start..Stop..Pause..Resume..." If they are not grey'd out, then use these. If the are grey'd out, then go into Properties and repeat step 5.
THE PROBLEM THAT REMAINS is you will need to do this EVERY TIME. Also, in my case, Avast Cleanup still persists in shutting off my VPN and putting it to "sleep" after its been on for more than 2 minutes. So without being able to "wake" it in the Cleanup program itself, your only option might be to have to uninstall Cleanup altogether and just get rid of it.