Hello DavidR!
Thanks a lot for your reply.
It indeed took me a while to pinpoint avast.
When the internet on my PC stopped working I thought that something else went wrong. Even though on my smartphone and tablet both connected via my router's WIFI internet was working fine I did reset my router's settings and so on. But all to no avail. Eventually I just restored a system backup and installed the respective updates.
In-between the installation of the updates and programs I had been checking whether internet access was working or not. And it was! Until I installed the latest version of avast free AV again (used default settings in avast)... I tried uninstalling avast to revert back to an older version but unfortunately that process turned out to be quite the pain... I could not uninstall it... Seems like fighting malware requires software that behaves like malware...
In the end I had to restore the system backup again.
Of course I made sure to grant all avast related components internet access in Outpost firewall. That process I'm quite used to. All the components visible on your screenshot are green on my PC too. (Thanks for going through the trouble of taking it.
)
As mentioned above build
19.1.4142 works perfectly!
Since I only use the components "File Shield" and "Web Shield" I suppose in the most recent version something about them was changed. And that something seems to mess things up on my PC.
Maybe some of the staff involved with the development might have a clue what's causing this.
I guess that sticking with an older version is just fine considering that you do that too.