Try just turning off the Avast! Online Security toolbar in Internet Explorer. That seems to fix the problem for the most part, particularly if you close and restart IE or reboot your system. However, i notice that since doing so Bing! has become my IE home page, which i would never allow in 1,000,000 years! Now i have to do a full system scan to make sure something hasn’t leaked in through IE - i generally use Chrome, which doesn’t seem to have the problem.