Asyn,
Your above link does not help. That topic relates to someone who is having trouble with his install of (apparently) version 17. The suggestion given there by MartinZ was "The program will automagically register itself 10 days after expiration even when you are offline" DID NOT WORK for that user. 10 days later nothing happened.
Your final suggestion was to upgrade to the latest version.
What sadiquidey and I want to do is to continue using our "older version" of avast Free and NOT "upgrade to the latest version". At
https://www.avast.com/registration-free-antivirus , avast promises that "older versions will keep working even after they've "expired"." So, I want to keep using my "older version" 9 (2014). How is that accomplished?
When my previous 1-year license expired, my avast Free instantly shut down the operation of all of its active-protection resident shields and prevented me from updating the virus definitions, rendering my avast Free essentially useless. It DID NOT "automagically register itself 10 days after expiration".
I do admit that there may be something lost in the translation from Czech to English. As a native English-speaker, to me, "older versions" means (A) versions 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 (i.e. versions that came out in years prior to 2017). It may be that what avast means when it says "older versions" they mean (B) version 17.x and later, which become "older versions" when the next year's version comes out. AND that avast's new licensing system does not apply to versions earlier than version 17. AND that, for versions earlier than version 17, avast has
deliberately disconnected those users ability to obtain another 1-year license.
The only way--that I can see--for users of versions earlier than version 17 to keep their version of avast Free "working" following the expiration of their pre-version 17 avast Free license is to un-install it, run avastclear.exe, and re-install it every 30 days.
Is there anybody out there
who actually knows what's going on here who can tell the rest of us?