Edited:

My original post detailed an issue I had with the SSD drive no longer being stable and a repair tech blamed it on Avast. After talking to him, I attributed the issue to an emergency update that was running at the time of the first crash. I’ve since come to learn that Avast DID NOT cause the issue. The problem and fix ended up being a bit more expensive than simply uninstalling Avast… needed a new motherboard. The machine’s running great now and I will be reinstalling Avast.

Just wanted to make sure to let others know that in my case, Avast wasn’t at fault!