Hi MrCK, welcome to the forums.
I think you gave answered your own question.
Yesterday I tried Etrust. They've got both antivirus and firewall, but I switched back... Avast! is in a class of its own...
It is definately the Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None. With specialist tasks I'd much rather have a piece of specialist software.
Yes you might lose one icon (you can always hide it from view) but you are still doing the same number of tasks, antivirus and firewall protection, so you won't necessarily save any ram or system resources.
I for one don't want to see avast become a piece of bloated software like NAV or Etrust (that you tried and dumped).
HTH David