Sorry if I came off as attacking or berating the users here. While Avast might monitor these forums, I don't consider here as a free venue for support from Avast. Mostly I'm looking for something other than the response expected from Avast (yeah, it works that way now and you'll have to endure it). That workarounds were suggested doesn't mean they exhibited less unwanted behavior than the problem that I was trying to correct. So, yes, suggestions were made but they were unacceptable as the behaviors in using those workarounds were just as intolerable (by me), or more, than the problem that I was trying to resolve.
Sometimes users will tell you how to accomplish a good workaround when the company will keep it secret. For example, when trialing Avira, I wouldn't have that adware on any of my hosts if it weren't for users that informed me how to remove the parameter in the registry Run key that plasters their adware banner when it loads when I log into my Windows account. These same users told me about the avnotify.exe which is the adware popup that appears during an update, and while many had several suggestions on how to prevent avnotify.exe from executing I came up with something a bit different by using SRPs (software restrictions policies) to block that executable from ever loading (so an update that replaced the renamed file or overwrote a zero-byte file would still have that same file get blocked from loading).
From the responses so far, there is no good workaround to get rid of the unwanted popup that appears during a scheduled scan. Not doing scheduled scans is one suggestion. That means sacrificing a wanted function of the security program. Another is to manually switch in and out of game mode. That means having to remember to do so and then remembering later to undo the change. I really prefer the software to work automatically, one of the strong points of computers, rather than have me do anything manually. The other suggestions were doable but not without their defects or unwanted behaviors. I was hoping someone came up with something that un-did the new change in behavior that appeared in this minor version update. So the final solution is to decide if I suffer with the popups or move to something else. I chose the latter.
I'll watch Avast to see if a later version adds the option for users to hide the progress dialog for scheduled scans. I like Avast and perhaps later I can resume using it. Since I see no changelog where users can see what changes were made in each version, I'll have to trial a later version (in a virtual machine) and check if the behavior got changed or the user was given an option to hide this popup but such trials are on a random schedule.
