I was advised to make my own thread about this issue, and I have attached the two Farbar logs, as well as the logs from the the MBR tool and Malwarebytes, even though they are not needed.
The main issue was various programs would hang on launch, and were not possible to close via Task Manager or even with Taskkill.exe (though the latter did say it was successful, but the processes remained in a hung state, and continued to hold onto the resources they had claimed during their attempts to run.)
Hardware all checks out. (Ran a full disk check a few days ago, ran processor diagnostics, and ran 4 full passes of Memtest 1.86+)
This system is in near-constant use, so it has had many updates and installations in the last month, however I ran through troubleshooting by removing individual programs as I suspected them, and narrowed the issue down to Avast itself.
I currently do not have Avast installed as a temporary measure, and to test if the issue has gone away, so the logs do indicate a competitor’s product installed on my machine. This is NOT the issue, it was not on my machine at the time of the issue!
Also, this machine has a full scan from Avast and Malwarebytes run on it weekly, so it’s very unlikely to have any undetected malware. (I even did some additional checks, such as a boot-time scan to verify there wasn’t anything when the issues cropped up.)
The issue that drew my attention to Avast being the problem was, on Friday morning, I launched a full scan at around 6AM (the logs are gone since I uninstalled the program…) and I checked around 11:30AM, and the scan had not progressed at all past 0%. The machine was responding so far as menus, the mouse, and such, so it hadn’t gone into a hard lockup, but definitely was not proceeding in any capacity. I rebooted the machine, and attempted to start a few programs, most of which hung up. I uninstalled Avast after finding another thread here that indicated a possible issue with 2016. I rebooted a few times and launched programs, nothing hung up with Avast removed. I cleaned up the registry and any remnants of Avast on the machine, and put a fresh install of it on. It seemed to work fine for several hours, but then today began with a bluescreen, and then the same program lockups as before. Of note, the FRST logs do not have any information on hangups other than Winamp, but I had Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, and Thunderbird also have similar such hanging issues… and would not allow termination through any of the usual means, aside from a reboot.