DavidR
2
Unfortunately it isn’t going to be easy to say one way or another if avast was responsible.
If there is any conflict, removing one element of that would resolve a conflict but it doesn’t prove it was at fault.
I would probably have restarted OE and or Avast Mail Shield or simply rebooted. If any of those resolved the problem, I would just have carried on without further investigation. Generally I don’t investigate any first instance of any problem until it becomes more consistent.