I "bit the bullet" and updated avast 6 to avast 7, after having gotten caught up in the mess a couple of night ago and doing a total uninstall/reinstall of avast 6. No problems; no hangs during the update process. Everything is working, including the streaming updates and the ability to open the program in Add/Remove programs, which was generating errors before the uninstall/reinstall. It took a while (I did the upgrade several hours ago) and it's now showing that an update was received 6:17 pm (it's now 7:38 pm here).