Would the McAfee I had installed have been conflicting with Avast if the McAfee was no longer active? It was not uninstalled (it is now) when I installed Avast, but had expired. As to your comment of me "skipping" off to another av software, let me say I do appreciate your advice and any help, however, based on advice given to me after I posted, I thought I would try the AVG. Hey, it is so easy to install and uninstall these so I will "skip" if necessary to find something that doesn't require me going thru a long process to get it to work with what I need. When I installed AVG I had absolutely no problem logging onto AOhell and my pogo games.
The problem is that even when disabled Resident AVs load low level drivers and it is these which most frequently are the cause of a conflict.
The latest version of avg8 also comes with its issues of remnants even after an uninstall - AVG8 Remover, download tool from here,
http://www.grisoft.com/ww.download-tools there is a 32bit and 64 bit windows version, ensure you use the correct one.
There have been a couple of posts on problems connecting to pogo, but I really don't know if that is a similar conflict problem and my knowledge of pogo is zero, so I don't know who you connect to it and how it runs the games. It may be that they are somehow streamed through the http port and with avast monitoring that it would be expecting standard http protocol. That however, is speculation on my part as I don't know how pogo works.
Some firewalls have a privacy function which when the web shield localhost proxy is added to the equation. The thing is that avast isn't a firewall and as such doesn't block, but scans content and alerts to infection, which is one of the reasons for the questions about your firewall ?
You could try Terminating the web shield if you can't logon to pogo and see if that breaks the conflict and we can try something else for a more permanent solution without terminating the web shield.
