Thank you for all your input.
While reading each of your posts, I was tempted to answer to each of those comments with my own experience. Until I got to SafeSurf's post.
Let me tell you, IMHO, this is turning to be "kinda' off" ridiculous.
I've been using Avast for several years, and I also recommend it to others. But last year I started to see some problems, and reporting them here did not solve the actual problem. Instead, the answer was the same as the one presented here by SafeSurf, which only deals with the behaviour or symptoms, not the actual problem.
Until version 5.0.5xx or 5.0.6xx, all the screen notifications for program updates were displayed within the day of release, or the day after. Let's say, just to give some spare, that it took a whole week.
Now users are saying that for them is still the same, and others are saying I should expect months, while the release is already official and declared stable. I'm also able to see the notification of a new version being available if I open the full UI.
So evidently the problem is not that Avast team is not sure if a simple home user could potentially have some incompatibility problem. Avast has millions of such users.
Moreover, the strange behavior has a workaround. I could simply update manually. But as I said before, that will not resolve "the problem" of the notifications.
So once again I am face with the classical workaround. My previous installation already started "clean", because I already followed those steps to "solve" the problems that appeared before (whatever they were, because we won't know, ever).
In addition, I reinstalled my Vista from scratch, without using backups, or cloning, nothing, just about 6 months ago. Since then, I don't remember receiving program notifications. Or maybe just once? The database notifications are OK though.
Now I have to spend time in dealing with this "workaround" once again. And let me tell you that completely configuring Avast (once again), although "nice" from the UI point of view, it is not efficient at all, having to set again and again the same settings for each shield. It could be versatile for some specific users (and versatility is excellent), but it could help to have the possibility to set a default once, reproduce it for all shields and then get into the details of each shield for the little tweaking we would want.
I have to say that I feel a little bit st*id, because I could have avoided myself the useless waiting all these months (just to be sure that there was a problem or not), and evidently I could have free myself from reporting this issue.
My experience is that Avast might be a good security program, but only if you have a "perfect" system. A normal user like me (at least I consider myself as such) that don't usually have security problems, should "know" that if there is some problem with Avast, instead of really resolving it, just simple "start again".
Since the real problem could be related to more serious issues in the program or its settings, I won't take the "lazy" path of manually updating and let it be. I probably will manually update, and then I will have to triple check that Avast was uninstalled, just to install it once again (and just to configure it once again).
As I said, thank you for your answers, even if the bottom line is simply to deal with the symptom instead of resolving the issue (which according to some posts in this same topic, the issue is not "just mine").