Vlk
44
OK guys, I feel lots of you are eagerly waiting for me to write something to this thread but I wish I had something new for you… 
I will try to be as technical as possible - I believe there has been enough haggling already. 
avast! uses RPC for its communication between ashServ.exe and ashDisp.exe (under NT based OSs only). I know most of you are not programmers but I can assure you that using RPC for such a purpose is a completely normal, supported, and recommended way of doing such things, and there must be hundreds of Windows programs that do just same… And, in fact, Windows itself uses LRPC (i.e. local RPC) for internal communication between some of its parts. It’s not that it is “listening on a port” - RPC is just a shell on top of other protocols (transports). One of these protocols is TCP/IP (so only in this case we could be talking about listening on a port), but avast does not use it. It just uses the LRPC - a custom, Windows-proprietary protocol that never ever touches the network and that you really don’t have to worry about - next time, you could have concerns about the security of displaying blue bitmaps on your screen, – little paranoid, don’t you think…? What I’m trying to say is that (the consumer edition of) avast never uses RPC for any kind of network communication, be it updating or anything else.
- the other thing is that all the RPC stuff is hosted in the RPC service (RPCSS), and I’m not familiar with a way to selectively disable RPC’s individual transports. If the DLL hack you’ve described works, good for you. But please note that what you’re doing has really nothing in common with avast – the RPC service is part of Windows (and by default, it’s ON). If you don’t like, you can disable it (or otherwise hack it) but you must be prepared that some other apps just won’t work. E.g. both Exchange Server and Outlook rely heavily on RPC over TCP/IP (as do things like NFS under Unix, though - just FYI).
Hope this helps,
Vlk