Although I don’t have a solution to the real annoying problem, and I do share the feeling about this type of intrusions, I’d like to add a sidenote.

The silent/gaming mode in Avast 6.0 is used for part of the situations described by galraith77, but I honestly don’t remember if this possibility was already there in v4.8.

My second comment is about updates. Even if the user selects to update manually, Avast may check for availability of database updates anyway. This depends on the specific settings. So, the possibility that this is chained with Avast checking for updates shouldn’t be discarded.

As I said, this unfortunately doesn’t really solve anything, specially for Dewg, the OP :frowning: .