Is this issue now being addressed or is a Full(?) Dump file still required? Incidentally when the Handle Count got up to 58,000 on my WinXP/SP3 system with 1GB memory, the network server stopped working and I got a System Event ID 2020 from Source Srv with "The server was unable to allocate from the system paged pool because the pool was empty."
When I look at the AvastSvc.exe handles with Process Explorer I see that there are multiple occurrences of the same handles, in particular the "defs" files, e.g., F:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\defs\11122102\s_idx.map as well as handles for the previous version of the "defs", e.g. F:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\defs\11122101\s_idx.map. Perhaps there's a clue here?