The beta has now been updated to build 6.0.1356.
BTW let me just say a few words about the dreaded 1354 update. This was probably one of the most interesting experiences we've ever had with a product update. The problem was related to this little item briefly mentioned in the revision history:
- speed optimizations in the updater
What this meant was that we rewrote a part of the updater which takes care of parsing of certain files in the avast SETUP folder. Now, the interesting part is that there was no problem with that code - it was implemented correctly, and thoroughly tested. However, there was a bug in a previous version of avast (probably all versions up to 6.0.1352) which caused one of the files to be malformed (under certain circumstances). The new optimized code didn't expect such a corrupted file though, and that resulted in the rather surprising symptoms many of you were experiencing - all sorts of erratic behavior.
This is also why the reaction to this build was somehow bipolar - either it was working perfectly fine (this was the case where the file had been OK) or it wasn't quite working at all (the case where the file had been corrupted).
The "fix" we implemented in v1356 allowed us to process both the valid and corrupted versions of the file.
Of course, let me apologize for any inconveniences this might have caused. This was a very interesting lesson for us - this was exactly the type of issue where external testing proved indispensable. However, this will hopefully allow us to also improve our internal QA process moving forward.
Thanks
Vlk