Network issues after installing Avast

So this isn’t a 1 off because the same thing happened on two different machines. In installed avast on two different machines yesterday. Both are running Big Sur. One is a M1 Mac and the other one is an Intel Mac. I use a SMB/Windows Share (spatial image file) for my time machine backups. After installing avast i can mount the SMB share but i can’t load the image file. When i try to load the image i will see it show up for like a sec or so and then it goes away (Disk Utility). If i uninstall Avast it starts working again. I have tried turning off all shields other than file shields and that doesn’t fix the issue. I’m not sure if the WiFi-Inspector is just a wifi scanner or is partially a firewall but i tried to change my home network to a home & have also tried to ignore my home network and that didn’t work. So i’m not sure what else i can try.

Hello,
Wifi Inspector does not interfere with network traffic. Have you tried to turn off File Shield instead? While we are normally testing File Shield with SMB, it is the prime culprit, as it scans some files that are being opened; no other shield should interfere with SMB.
Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

Thanks for the reply. Yep as a last ditch effort i turned off all shields. It didn’t make a difference.

Is there anything for me to do from here? I would like to purchase your premium product but this is a real show stopper of a bug for me. I have been evaluating other AV products: Bitdefender, eset, & kaspersky and none of them cause this issue. What is there left to do? I know this is definitely a bug.