Vlk
2
It is still necessary to use the UseRAS setting.
Let me explain this little more. By default, avast uses the PING command to find out whether the computer is online (or, to be more specific, whether it can access at least one of its update servers). The problem with PING is that is causes the ‘Dial a connection’ dialog to appear under Win9x, forcing the user to take an action. That is of course unacceptable, so avast tries to always disable this feature before performing the PING. The problem is, however that unsuccessful PINGs take a lot of time, so in result the ‘never dial a connection’ setting effectively gets activated too often (and for too long time) - in fact almost all the time… Basically, this is caused by the poor design of the dial-up support in Win9x where the ‘never dial a connection’ setting is system-wide, whether it should actually be process-wide (as is almost everything else).
So we added the UseRAS feature that uses a different approach. Instead of the PINGs, it periodically queries the status of the modem. Of course, this only works if you have a dial-up modem (so this setting should never be used if the connection is implemented by other means). In addition, there was a bug in build 229 that caused the modem status query to always succeed… Version 235 should have it right, I believe, but from your post, I’m starting to doubt it… 
Vlk