Maybe you have a firewall issue…
The message is typical of MailWasher: you are opening the program ‘before’ a connection was established and you check to download messages at startup.
Wait a litte to start MailWasher.
If you want to delay the avast update some seconds after the connection were established, try to see here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=1647
Do you use a proxy filter?