Yes, I had restarted my computer more than once after the Avast update. I did disable the shields, and that made a huge difference on Firefox.
Weird thing, too, though, was whenever I would right-click or just try to open Avast, it would take forever.
I've never used anything but Avast as my main anti-virus. I do have Malwarebytes but just for manual scanning.
When I checked for the version of Windows 10 (64) that I have, I noticed that the last automated update failed. I manually checked for updates, and there were some, so downloaded and install updated manually, and it worked fine. After this, and restarting my computer several times, now everything works perfectly and speedy, just like before all this started. (Current version of Windows 10 (64) is 20H2 and the build is 19042.685.)
It started three days ago, and was getting worse each day, online and with opening Avast...ridiculously slow. Updating Avast seemed to help for a few hours, but then it didn't and things actually got worse. Now, after fixing the Windows update issue, everything is working great...just hope it stays that way.
Maybe it was a combination of things; who knows. Just hope it stays fixed!
Thanks!!