AvastSvc hammering "system32\CatRoot" at boot and at random intervals afterwards

I’m otherwise ok with avast except for this very irritating problem.
Randomly, avast decides that my pc is not to be used for entire minutes, locking it down with 100% uninterrupted disk usage as it is heavily querying the folder CatRoot{F7… in my system.
That folder contains around 2500 elements totaling at circa 70 MB.
When this activity happens, procmon displays a humongous wall of avastsvc reading catroot files non-stop.

What’s the cause for such a massive activity to happen? How to at least soften the issue? Perhaps a setting in avast is the culprit? Or can I delete the contents of catroot?

Delete the folder.
It is used for Windows updates and will created again if Windows needs it.