I gave up on waiting. I went ahead and did a full system reformat so I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you out on #1 and #2.
As for #3, that’s a no and #4 is a no as well. I closed all IE windows and the memory consumption kept increasing by about 3-5 MB per hour and I have never messed with avast settings except to disable logging.
Thanks for trying to help anyway.