alright, so after a while of waiting, tech support did finally get back to me, with somebody who actually knows what theyre talking about luckily and has gotten a "work around" to get the webshield working for me, i had to manually enter a proxy IP and port into my browser for avast's webshield to scan sites.
im hoping they can get this problem worked out officially though so that the work around isnt required everytime, for every browser i may have. but for now, it is working at least.