Outside of Avast! are there any sandboxes or virtual programs that can protect you from any, and all, infections when browsing or enough that surfing becomes highly secure?
Thanks
There are many VM’s around.
And I’ve never seen it that when a OS running in a VM got infected, it spread tomain system.
Personally I use this one > https://www.virtualbox.org/
The avast sandbox is a controlled environment (although it does offers a extra layer of protection), it is not a real VM as you can not install a OS in it.
Keep in mind that 100% protection against all bad things is not possible.
Some suggestions :
If you gonna use a VM, install the OS and create a copy of it.
If anything happens or you want to start over, it is much easier/faster than setting it up from scratch again.
Make sure you have enough physical ram in your system.
You need (roughly) 3x the amount of ram installed as you need to run the main OS decently if you install the same OS in the VM.
Besides the Avast Sandbox there is also Sandboxie https://www.sandboxie.com
I use both, and imo a lifetime license of Sandboxie is worth the money 
Greetz, Red.
Why paying for something if there is a better solution for free ?
A VM and a Sandbox are two different things, with different purposes imo
Greetz, Red.
Running a application in a sandbox still has access to everything that is not sandboxed which is a security risk.
A VM simulates en entirely separate computer/system.
downloads, changes, updates, installations etc done within a VM have only effect on the OS that is run within the VM which is much safer.
That depends on the configuration of the Sandbox.
I definitely agree with you here
Greetz, Red.
+1 here for Sandboxie.
Having a completely Separate VM using Virtualbox has issues, namely not all Processors support the virtualization instructions needed to hardware accelerate the VM (Particularly common with budget processors, AMD seems really bad about this), and not everyone has enough RAM to run a 2nd OS at the same time. With that said, it is the most secure way if you can do it.
How can an infection picked up using Sandboxie get into your system? Is that probable?
Thanks for all the replies. Appreciate it.
You’re welcome
Sometimes ( most of the time ) we lose ourselves in discussions about what WE like.
But that is part of the game I think 
Greetz, Red.