Possible Avast and Windows Automatic Updates issue

[RedShiftToo]

Thank-you all for your responses.  I have followed the suggestions.  The laptop appears to be behaving better.  I will post any happenings here.  Particularly after Patch Tuesday.  Are the Avast Makers considering putting in a default wait before it goes to the web to check for updates?  I fully understand that you can't be solving problems caused by others, but as a user, it would have been really helpful.  I had to uninstall about 8 applications to figurew out there was a clash.

Once again, thanks for all your help!

Ludo

[Lisandro]

Are the Avast Makers considering putting in a default wait before it goes to the web to check for updates?

This is already present at avast settings.
Sure, just change (or add) AlwaysConnectedWaitSeconds value into the [InetWD] section of avast4.ini file.

You could set the number of seconds to wait before attempting to update. The default is 30 but it may not be enough in some DSL systems. In this case, you can try increasing this e.g. to 60 (1 minute). That should be enough.
More details here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=1647

Alan's experience: This is especially true during Windows update week.  Windows automatic updates seem to hog resources even to just determine that updates do exist but you are just not allowed to download them yet (to prevent overload of Microsoft's servers).  So this is happening at every startup during the Windows update period until you have been permitted to download the updates.  Although I do not have "smoking gun" logs to prove it (a bit hard to get on an overloaded system at startup) I am reasonably certain that the Windows automatic update process, at this time, can prevent the avast automatic VPS update from getting timely access to it servers and causing avast to report an automatic update error - especially on older, less powerful systems.    This past week was Windows update week, some folks this week waited 4 or 5 days before being permitted to download the Windows updates through the automatic update process.