I then moved to Avast because it had some good write ups and it certainly was much quicker and more responsive. I do hope something can be done to prevent it going the same way as AVG.
What you've done was to delay the start of the process to check for updates to the VBS file.Apparently that process was starting early for you and may have slowed down the overall boot time.
Even with the increased protection, avast! is still extremely light on system resource usage.
It certainly isn't bloatware. :)