update: spoke too soon, another 5+ minute shutdown earlier today on latest 20.9
okay, some good news to report, the very very newest 20.9 beta, not the one from last week but build 5730, finally seems to solve the shutdown problem, it's now back to seconds instead of many minutes
but unfortunately there is a new problem with 20.9, any GUI popup or attempt to bring up the menu immediately freezes the GUI and access to the rest of windows desktop until I use control-alt-delete to start the task manager
I basically cannot "touch" avast, the systray or the menus or it ghosts out, not even the X in the corner of any popup from Avast
it appears the core engine is still running though for what that is worth
since the changelog mentions GUI changes since 20.7 I believe, it's probably related to that
can avast tell me what registry setting to change to fallback to the old GUI interface/method? I won't be able to access it from the troubleshooting menus