jdalkas welcome to Avast! Forums

There are countless topics about this Avast! behaviour in the Forums. You only have to look for it in Search. From user who inadvertently click a promotion alert window to increase their security to Pro or IS to not running the right installer, but most of them are due to run Windows Restore to a previous date (State).

Avast! does not like it when Windows Restore is applied. So to minimize this odd behaviour, it is recommended to deactivate Avast! self-defence module before doing a Windows Restore.

Open Avast! > Settings > Troubleshooting > Disable Avast! self-defence module.

This or other might be your case and the only solution is to do a clean install of the FREE version.

Note: When running aswclear.exe in Safe mode, run it first for previous Avast! versions. ie, v.5, v.6, and v.7 and last for v.8.