Last update for the day… did the manual edit to the avast.ini file as DavidR prescribed. Actually had to do this in Protected Mode too since Avast wouldn’t let me shut down the process that was holding onto the ini file. Finally, I can get some work done on here since Avast isn’t hogging 60% of CPU anymore.

I’ll just call this a temporary workaround until the developers get to the bottom of this.

Thanks again to DavidR and the other contributors.