Same or similar issue here. Updated the programme this morning and rebooted as requested, and now when I go into the "Realtime Shield" window of the GUI there is no display of the graph thing in any of the shields at all, though they all say they are "running". When I open a page on firefox the avast ball turns in the tray icon, but the displays on all the realtime shields are all totally empty for files scanned/infected and last file scanned etc. If I click on show traffic history though it takes me to the statistics windows, and those graphs are all displayed OK. If I click on "today" it does show activity on all the graphs for the last 5mins - just not in the realtime shields window.
I'm using windows vista home premium 32bit, with windows defender in realtime, and on demand MBAM. vista firewall (which does not have any avast processes ticked, but it never has and I've never had an issue before). Using free avast.
EDIT - whoops - have just seen your post VLK. Excellent thanks.
VLK - sorry, one more thing - even though those fields are blank, can you confirm that avast! is still scanning and protecting in realtime? Thanks.