Maybe I can help someone who had a similar problem to me. It had to do with an RPC error everytime I tried to start the resident protection as the taskbar icon was blocked by a red cross. i tried numerous times to fix this by uninstalling the program and starting fresh, but to no success. I was contented in starting avast manually. Then I decided to give it another shot. After I uninstalled I restarted in Safemode and reinstalled. To my surprise and delight when I rebooted in normal mode Avast was fully functional. 
3rdsun,
Very interesting. It indicates that some of the files loaded during startup affected the Avast program.
Safe Mode only loads the basic necessary operating systems files.
Nice fix though. Thank you for letting us know.
Techie
Nice work, 3rdsun … and welcome to the forums! 