Update...after a lot of testing, installing, and uninstalling, I discovered the problem with the security center was revouninstaller and MS Security Essentials. I used Revo to uninstall MSE and it deleted registry keys related to the security center. Fortunately, I made an image of my hard drive before I made changes. I just restored the image and I did not allow Revo to delete the keys again. I then reinstalled Avast and everything is fine. Avast is running and security center is running and it recognizes Avast. I chose not to installed the additional plugins though, since I was not familiar with them.
I did have a couple of false positives though. I sent them to Avast for additional analysis. I also uploaded them to virustotal and only 2 or 3 scanners reported a threat...that is why I believe they are false positives, but I did move them to the virus chest for now. I hope to really enjoy this program for years to come. I really like that Avast doesn't install a bunch of other utilities to try to get you to pay for them like AVG. Please don't start doing that.