The http://www.avast.com/virus-update-history page still shows 131203-1 as the latest version - we have however seen that avast 9 update stream doesn’t necessarily follow that same update stream. We have also seen the http://www.avast.com/virus-update-history page be a little out of date, so I wouldn’t get to excited if avast 9 doesn’t match that.

With the streaming update avast 9.0 is less reliant on the regular updates.

There are times when my about avast shows not connected, but again I have still received 117 streaming updates since 121203-1 was released. So I don’t think it has to be connected every minute of the day for it to work.

Have you tried a manual update ?
If so what happened, errors etc. ?