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Thanks to all who responded with personal experience with this update (and no great thanks for those who simply speculated and turned this into a debate or criticism of others).
The only real power of a forum such as this is in the sharing of personal experience.
After successfully testing the update in a Win 8.1 virtual machine, and using it for a few days, I updated my host system by visiting the Avast UI page and having it install the update (then reboot).
Seems to have worked, and the system is stable, though I have had one glitch: Some time after I logged in this morning (system was left running, just logged out), the Avast icon in the System Tray told me I was unprotected. I haven’t seen that happen before. The only time in recent history that I messed with the protection was to Disable the Shields for 10 minutes to run a benchmark day before yesterday (I NEVER disable Shields permanently). Possibly the re-enable process never automatically occurred as it was supposed to. I don’t know if this is a new problem, as I only rarely disable the shields temporarily anyway.
-Noel