Well it's been fun.
I have been a happy Avast user since 2003, used it at home, in my company and have used it for the companies I used to support. But no more, I simply cannot use an AV program that regularly uses between 80% and 100% of my CPU doing nothing and eats up around 100 MB of RAM even with all shields off..
Even when I disable all shields and having nothing but Windows XP SP3 running the AvastSvc.exe hogs the CPU almost non stop.
This started happening about 5 days ago to all 3 of my computers, I have ensured everything is up to date, uninstalled malwarebytes, made sure no other Anti-Virus programs are running and still the same thing. The systems are basically unusable due to the Avast use of the CPU. The most amazing thing is that this even happens with all shields disabled.
This was happening to my Toshiba laptop with 1.7GHz and 512 MB RAM, to my work machine with 2.8GHz and 1 GB RAM and to my gaming system with 3.0GHz and 2 GB RAM.
I have removed Avast 5 from all 3 systems and installed Avira, now my systems are back to working again.
I'll try Avast again someday once the bugs have been worked out of version 5.