Thanks, Eddy, for your additional reply, and pm (which I can’t reply to). I’m not sure what you mean by “a repair of Avast!”, I couldn’t find anything in the interface that is called that.

Tuesday and yesterday were really busy, but I did get a chance on Tuesday to experiment with the one bank site, and determined that the “suspicious activity” that they were reporting was apparently because I included a couple special characters in my password, even though there was fine print nearby saying to use only alphanumerics. So that problem is not related to Avast!

Not sure about the free credit report site. I tried again the next day, and it still wouldn’t give me a report via the web… wanted me to send them personal information by mail to prove my identity. I have successfully accessed the reports via the web before, but it has been a couple years, not even from this computer, but I have run Avast! on my last several computers! But, lots has changed besides Avast! This may or may not be related to Avast!, but with the email problem, and the bank problem together, it seemed it could be related, so I wanted to report it. With the bank problem now understood and resolved, and not related to Avast!, it seems less likely that the free credit report problem is related, but hard to be sure one way or the other. I haven’t encountered other web problems in the last couple days, so probably not.

So it seems I have one problem with the latest Avast! that I can document and demonstrate: that the mail shield inserts a self-signed certificate into the computer (somewhere, somehow) that causes nPOPuk and Thunderbird to report problems. If Avast! is going to use a certificate, it should be one signed by a trusted certificate authority. I understand that Avast! would not be able to scan an encrypted communication stream without either having an add-on for (each) email program, or being able to proxy the communication stream.

Happily, my email programs do not run scripts, so I am pretty safe from problems that intrude via email, and the File Shield should provide protection from attachments that may be problems, if I actually attempt to run them. But the use of a self-signed certificate, which results in errors being displayed to the user, and a failure to obtain mail when the Mail Shield is enabled, seems problematical. The mail programs are correctly detecting that there is a man-in-the-middle attack potential, and although it is by Avast! which might be trusted by its users, it is quite alarming to non-technical users such as my mother, and quite annoying to me until I realized that somehow Mail Shield was enabled on my machine and the source of the problem.

I certainly couldn’t recommend running without Mail Shield to a user of Outlook or Outlook Express or M$ Mail, which are happy to run scripts that arrive via email.