So the problem seems to have gone away on my laptop, but my wife's brand new Win10 HP laptop is showing the same issues. AvastSVC will start taking up all the CPU and kill the connection at the same time. I don't have time to figure it out there, but I have uninstalled it for now. Not sure what the hell is going on with Avast, but this is very disappointing. Again, that is a brand new computer... no previous install of anything, and it's having these issues?!
Not sure how to resolve this, but I am willing to test a bit more later on... just to frustrated to deal with it today...
EDIT: I noticed the link to "how to install Avast" in bob3160's post... where it recommend using the clean uninstaller for the previous AV program (McAfee, I think). I may give that a try... not sure if I need to try other uninstallers as well... who knows what else HP installed in there to begin with? I only recall pulling McAfee during my setup process.