Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately it did not solve the problem. And despite a week of requesting help from Avast tech support, I have received only one response (full of grammatical mistakes and sounding as if noone had read or understood my questions) asking for details on my operating system. I've sent all that in (along with the requested HijackThis info), but still no response.
Have any other users found this problem -- it takes 4 to 5 minutes after turning on the computer for the realtime shields to activate, and I am on an ADSL wireless connection so that's 4 to 5 minutes unprotected.
Will just revert to older version of Avast Pro, again. ....