I just bought the Pro Family Pack. So far, I have installed on WHS, one XP-SP3 workstation, and one Vista x64-SP2 workstation. On Vista x64, the “a” icon disappears immediately when I first hover over it. It operates properly on WHS and XP. Also, on Vista, I don’t see the script blocker splash screen when opening IE8, but I do see the plug-in splash screen when opening Outlook 2007. I uninstalled and reinstalled, with same results. I tried disabling UAC, with same results.
On Vista, the Script Blocker does not “work” as IE8 runs in Protected Mode on Vista.
The icon disappearing is weird anyway… Is Standard Shield running?
If you run ashdisp.exe from avast folder, does the icon stay there?
Did you use any other antivirus before avast?
If yes, which one and how did you remove it?
Do you use any other security software? (antivirus, firewall, antispyware,…)
onlysomeone
I performed some experiments, and I have narrowed down the cause of the “a” icon disappearing. I have my workstations set for auto-login to the normal user. In the HKCU.…\Run key, I have a program that engages the screen saver. It is completely trivial, 2 Windows API calls: SendMessage(GetDesktopWindow(), WM_SYSCOMMAND, SC_SCREENSAVE, 0); and my default screen saver locks. When I disable this action, I have no problem. If I delay this action by 30 sec during login, I have no problem. So, it appears that if the screen saver is engaged before the app fully initializes, the app creates some windows as children of the screen saver desktop, which is on a different WinStation, and when the app tries to display the tooltip upon hover, it gets some internal exception and closes windows, but stays running. I have had this login screen saver lock active for years in my setup, and this is the first app to experience any problem related to this. So I have a workaround, although it increases my insecure time window during startup. However, it may be simple for you to make your app more robust with respect to this, now that you know how this can happen.
I changed my program, from invoking the screen saver as described in my previous post, to simply calling LockWorkStation(). This doesn’t give me the same aesthetically pleasing effect, but it does keep me as secure as ever, and it does not upset ashDisp. So, I’m doing OK now, and I consider this issue closed.
Nice to hear you found a solution! 
Feel free to come back whenever you want!
yours
onlysomeone