system
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Hello!
Today finds me feeling very pleased with myself. 
I have, I think, solved almost all of my problems with Avast!.
After reading the replies to my post of yesterday (thanks!), I realised that the dll modification had actually worked, in as far as that whilst Avast! was still causing dial-up-behaviour, the Avast!/RPCSS process was no longer contributing toward this.
It then occurred to me that I had seen references to an .ini file modification in several threads, and so I edited my Avast! .ini file (whilst I was at it I also altered some timeout values which seemed far too low).
Now my firewall traffic log shows that neither Avast! nor RPCSS is constantly listening/attempting to access the internet.
Enough of my gloating.
In reading this thread, I have been struck by the fact that many seem not to understand the fundamental differences between NT/2000 & 98/ME.
Many network protocols and the associated services and processes are native to NT/2000 and are run automatically and by default. RPC is, I think, one of these.
Most of these protocols/services/processes are not native to 98 or ME and are tacked on for reasons of cross-platform compatability. But they don’t always play nicely.
So, in NT/2000, RPCSS would almost certainly be running anyway. However, in ME (and I suspect 98), RPCSS is not widely utilized and certainly on my machine it was not used by any of my autorun services until I installed Avast!.
So, there you have it.
Cheers;
Flash.