OK, I have now installed the beta as per forum directions, and I am running avast 4.8.1187.
When webshield is enabled, my browsers will eventually cease working. They seem to work fine for a while, but eventually they will stop. I can exit the browsers, and restart them, and they will still not be working. However, if I turn off webshield, and then exit and restart the browsers, they work fine.
Getting the browsers to cease can either require waiting for a while, or really driving them hard. The way I have learned to get them to stop working the fastest is to start up both Firefox and IE, and then to surf like a maniac. Go to the NYTimes home page on one tab of firefox, and yahoo on another tab of firefox, and aol.com in IE. And then start just ctrl-clicking on links, thereby opening new windows with new articles in new tabs, moving to those tabs, ctrl-clicking on links in those new tabs, closeing tabs that are in the middle of loading, and just basically cramming a lot of information from two different browsers at the same time through the HTTP pipe. Since doing this will cause the failure in a short time, or not "misbehaving" in this way can cause the failure if I just use the browsers normally for a couple of hours, I am suspecting that there is some kind of memory leak or buffer overflow in the webshield implementation, but that is just my suspicion.
Question: Now that I have the beta installed (and have turned webshield off) should I leave it on there? Will the "real" new version auto-update the way it would have if I had not forced the beta update?
Thanks again.