I believe your problem then is having two resident AVs installed on the same system:
Having two resident anti-virus scanners installed is one too many and not recommended as rather than provide twice the protection it can cause conflicts that could leave you more vulnerable.

Whilst I have no idea what the Rogers ISP security software contains, at the very least it will be an AV.

The windows 7 firewall has outbound protection disabled by default so it shouldn’t be an issue. As you say you have it switched (this is a mistake you need a firewall) there is even less chance of it having any effect.

If the the Rogers protection includes a firewall then you need to find its settings for program control and have it allow avastSvc.exe (full path to the file C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\AvastSvc.exe).