The guidelines for solving of the problem of using too much CPU has always been the same:
- Check if the avast tray icon is spinning (while CPU usage is high)
- If it is, click it (wait for the dialog box to open), and check which file is being scanned (spinning icon means a scan is in progress)
- Find out which of the providers is scanning the file for each of the Shields.
Please download: http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessExplorer.zip
Run it as administrator, find “AvastSvc.exe” process (avast! service) and when it’ll use high CPU, right-click it and choose “Create dump > Full dump”. Then compress the dump file and upload it to ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming/.
You can also use http://public.avast.com/~vlk/hangrep.exe to generate a manual dump of the application (in this case, avastSvc.exe