I don't pretend to be an expert, nor do I understand how Azureus works "under the hood", but I have researched this a little bit further and found some interesting things.
When running Azureus, the only thing that appears as a running process is "Azureus.exe". Neither java.exe or javaw.exe show up in task manager. The Azureus process does use a significant amount of memory and processor (gotta love Java apps), so it appears to be performing all of the file read/writes. The Azureus changelog was not much help in clarifying this, all it says is this:
Under Windows, now runs via a launcher built by exe4j - taskmanager process is now "Azureus.exe"So I checked the exe4j website and it says this:
exe4j launches your Java application in such a way, that the exe4j executable and not java.exe or javaw.exe will appear in the task manager. In Windows XP, the task bar grouping will display the name of your executable and the associated icon, instead of the non-descript terminal icon and the string "javaw".It sounds like exe4j just makes your Java app "spoof" a name that will appear in task manager, while java.exe or javaw.exe does the real work. This just confuses the issue more.
So rather than waste my time Googling for more confusing answers, I left Azureus running while monitoring file read/writes on my system with Sysinternals File Monitor. this was the result (short version):
It would appear that Azureus.exe is indeed performing the actual write functions and should therefore now be compatible with avast's P2P scanning (if I actually understand how the P2P scanning works).