I'm saying that if you stop the resident protection, the self-defense is pointless (it's there to prevent killing the antivirus by an unknown malware - but if you stop the resident protection, the antivirus doesn't run anyway) - so if you want to "use" the antivirus this way, simply disable the self-defense as well... I don't see why you want to have the resident protection stopped and self-defense active.
Ok, I see what you're saying. The reason I want to be able to shut everything down without turning off
the self-defense is that it's another thing I'd have to re-enable when I want to use Avast!. Right now,
I have the main service set to manual, not automatic, and the AvastUI removed from the auto-start list.
Thus, I boot windows and Avast! is not running. I can launch the main service manually, and then
click on the icon to launch AvastUI.exe and I'm good to go--two steps. If I had disabled the
self-protection, then I'd need to go into settings and re-enable it, another step to remember.
As for why the consent dialog isn't there for killing AvastUi... I assume because there exists a common "interface" for stopping services (which the user can invoke from the Service manager, for example) - while killing a process is quite a special action. Besides, I don't know why you'd want to kill AvastUI anyway - if you don't want it running, remove the corresponding auto-start entry from registry.
See the above. The reason is that though I indeed have the machine configured so Avast! doesn't run
on boot, if I do run Avast! and then want to stop running it, I can't shut down the AvastUI process without
shutting off the self-defense module, which I then must re-enable since I want to use it when I use Avast.