And I believe this is where the problem lies… Avast needs to fire their QA engineers for not testing the new Webshield.

http://www.avast.com/en-us/release-history
2013-12-17
• Fully rewritten WebShield so that it now doesn’t work as a “transparent proxy” anymore, which should result in an overall improvement in stability and performance. It also allows to see and detect more threats