Yes, Joseph, I just tried true indian’s suggestion, even though I agree the way it was stated is a bit insulting, and I agree with you that we should not have to do that unless instructed by the v7 installer. That put behind us, I had to reboot in safe mode because the Avast Uninstaller did not work, and had to run aswclear.exe which I downloaded from the link true indian provided, followed all instructions to delete folders (but the file asw2rdr.sys did not exist and I assume it was removed by aswclear.exe), rebooted normally after the uninstall, and installed v7 from scratch (did not reboot after that because Avast did not say to do that).
That went much better than last night without any BSOD’s this time, but the updating issue remains. However, the first time I tried to update the Engine and Virus Definitions, it did NOT get stuck and said I have the latest. But the Update Program still hangs up, and now so does the update Engine and Virus Definitions, just like before.