This was one weird experience. See near the end of this post for even more weirdness.
When the Real-Time Shields and the Firewall did not show up in .1354 I decided to uninstall AIS using "aswclear6.exe". I then installed MSE.
When I saw that .1356 was available correcting the problem in .1354 I uninstalled MSE and reinstalled AIS.
After the reinstall all my Custom Scans were gone along with the my Default Scan preferences which I expected.
However, what was weird was that that my Real-Time Shields personal perferences and Firewall personal preferences remained in tact from what they were on .1354 even though I uninstalled .1354 using "awsclear6.exe"Everything appears to be in order.
Two bad Betas in less than 10 days is a bit much, eh
Thanks to the avast! team for jumping on this problem ASAP and fixing it.
Time to move on

, hopefully with better QA on avast! part.