Avast 9.0.2011 chewing up CPU, blocking all connections

I thought Avast was finally working properly after multiple upgrades, installs, uninstalls, reinstalls, etc. It’s been fine for the past few weeks, but yesterday it reverted to it old behavior. AvastSve.exe jumps to 25% of CPU activity and stays there. I can’t open any web pages in either Firefox or Chrome and can’t download or send emails. Rebooting doesn’t fix the problem – Avast reverts to this behavior as soon as I open a web page. The only fix I’ve found is to disable the web shield (which takes several minutes to do when Avast is in this state). I checked for a newer version but the updater says I have the latest one.

Try the new beta, many fixes included within http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=144768.0

I installed the beta and that went smoothly. I’ll write back if it doesn’t fix the problems.