What more than the current versions of Avast and Internet Explorer were needed to address this issue? I might’ve mentioned the OS (Windows XP) but I didn’t think it relevant to the behavior of the toolbar in IE8 on any version of Windows where IE8 may be present (Windows XP, Vista, 7). Also, I configured my profile to strip out signatures, so I don’t bother adding one of my own.

Since it’s just a voting scheme for now, and not even one with reputation weighting, and because most sites I’ve tested so far note that the rating is based on low vote count, I’ll disable it again and wait for subsequent improvements and enhancements. Just seems it was premature to add this feature in a released version.