I just noticed this today, after getting fed up with my system being irrationally slow online, while my fiancee's system next to mine (connected to the same router) had none of the lag.
Looking at the port traffic, I saw hundreds of "unknown" connections, all from port 12080, and the destination ports were a constant escalation. HUNDREDS of these connections. It looks exactly like a portscan in its activity and progression.
Look, I don't care if this thing is only referencing the internal loopback address; the system still has to tend to the constant stream of new ports being opened by Avast as it runs through this routine that apparently somebody thought would be acceptable behavior, and it most certainly has an adverse affect on the system's ability to process the web traffic I'm actually wanting it to do.
Total active ports on system with Avast running (and most frivolous add-ons like Web Shield and Mail Shield turned off): 586
Total active ports on system with Microsoft Security Essentials running instead (stock installation, no settings modified): 145
Folks, that is a whopping 441 ports that Avast was keeping in the list. Now to be fair, 302 of those were in Time Wait state (waiting to timeout and close), but that means that Avast is still actively keeping 139 ports open/listening/established at a time, opening new ones with incrementally increasing destination ports. That is simply not acceptable for a program that is supposed to be a behind-the-scenes utility. I want my anti-virus scanner to be almost a thing forgotten until it's needed. If I wanted a system of protection that intentionally lagged my system, I would've installed McAffee's or Symantec's products.
As it is, since this behavior seems to have been defended for years on these forums as legitimate and as-intended, I have no choice but to switch away from a long-time friend that seems to be following in the "big guys'" footsteps with the feature creep, social networking and internal advertising.
