"But if I ever do shut-down-and-exit, I know that when I restart the providers, all of them (that are active for me) can be done in one step. "

That doesn’t make it “correct” as it is now!
When someone clicks Start for a provider then why would they think that it would start ALL providers??? It just doesn’t make SENSE, even though, as I myself noted, it was convenient in my case.

You can’t think of when you might want to shut down all providers… well I gave the case for when I did NEED to. You are a lucky person if you can always be sure that Avast! is never a potential problem in some OTHER part of the system.

A simple checkbox with something like “Start all providers” would make it clear to anyone and it would still let people start providers 1-by-1 if they felt a need to do so.

JimN