No. I haven’t even heard about MVPS hosts file. I personally upgrade my copy of Avast from GUI but one user in Russian sub-forum said he couldn’t download v.6.0.1000 from the official site. At that time I thought it was a temporary glitch and I gave him the links to download from Softportal.ru. But now I wanted to give Russian installation file to one of my friends and couldn’t download it. I have to download a multilingual file from the direct links in your post about v.6.0.1091.
My system: Vista Home Basic SP2 32-bit; browser Firefox 3.6.16