avast! preventing autosleep (powercfg -requests)

I recently have this problem with win7 not going to sleep automatically. It will sleep when I press the sleep button but won’t automatically go to sleep after 60 minutes (which is how I have it set in the power options).

I used a couple powercfg commands in an elevated command prompt and they both indicated that avast was the problem.

powercfg -requests
DISPLAY: None.

SYSTEM:
[SERVICE] \Device\HarddiskVolume1\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\AvastSvc.exe (avast! Antivirus)

AWAYMODE:
None.

powercfg -energy

This command takes about 60 seconds to complete and then it saves an analysis report to an html file. The output in the command prompt window indicates where the html file is located. The first error in that analysis report is:

System Availability Requests:System Required Request The service has made a request to prevent the system from automatically entering sleep. Requesting Service avast! Antivirus

I’ve just updated the avast program recently and I think that is when I started having this problem.

Program version 2014.9.0.2011
Virus definitions version 140118-1
Number of definitions 2,560,560

Does anyone have any suggestions on why avast is causing this issue and what I can do to fix it?
Thanks in advance.

I can confirm this is a problem on my computer. If I manually put it to sleep, it work fine, but it will not automatically sleep. Windows 7.

In another thread (unrelated) I saw a mention of the ‘repair option’. I tried it and it seems to have fixed my problem. Make sure to reboot after…I didn’t right away and thunderbird was not working (I kept getting an ‘add security exception’ popup).

The comment on the other thread:

have you tried avast repair controlpanel > ad/remove programs > avast > uninstall/change > repair option ...wait a minute and reboot