Avast Pro Causing Periodic Computer Lag

I have been using Avast Pro for a couple years. Four days ago, my computer randomly started freezing for 1-5 seconds periodically, about every 5 minutes. Music, video, and livestreams would “skip”, mouse would move slowly, etc. Task manager showed no change in CPU or RAM resource usage during the freezing so I could not identify the process causing it. I then started disabling/uninstalling software one-by-one in order to identify. I speculated it was Avast. I did a reset of the OS (not a drive wipe) and chose to delete local files, and computer was running fine as I reinstalled my programs. As soon as I installed Avast, the problem started again immediately. I have tried using the update and repair options within Avast without success. I have uninstalled it and my system is running normally again. I am able to participate again in work video conferences without the skipping, but now I’m only running on Windows default AV. Any ideas what to do from here in order to keep using Avast Pro?

Avast Pro Version: 20.10.2442 (build 20.10.5824.624)
OS: Windows 10 64, Version 20H2 (19042.746)
No other security software
No previous AV other than Windows Defender

I think its updating of avast (streaming updates) …

Some additional info… I have a second computer that also just started experiencing this. The second one is my media PC and our movies started skipping. I went straight to uninstalling Avast Pro and the skipping went away.