Farewell Avasters, I gave up and rather than back out the upgrade (I had made several other installs and upgrades since then...) I decided to just uninstall and go with another antivirus alltogether (I did not feel it wise to forever stay with an old version of an AV...).
As indicated in the "edit" in the prior post, after the reinstall things looked good, but I think that maybe after the reinstall, the auto update was "on" and it must have updated something that caused it to regress to the problems outlined in the above posts. I would have liked to resolve the problems, but just did not have the time to experiment with possible solutions. Maybe someday I will be back, but for now it's ANTIVIR.
An interesting parting note. I downloaded the AVAST uninstall module, followed the procedures, and after my PC was supposedly clean of AVAST, my firewall caught AVAST trying to "phone home"!!!
Hope you all have better luck than I did with 4.5, and meanwhile fare well....maybe I'll be back some day...