system
10
Ran into the other half of the problem this morning >:(
If the ball is in “bearded” mode, I could not get the repair started. In Add/Remove programs, when I clicked Change/Remove it hung without bringing up the avast panel.
It took me about 10-15 reboots and a bit of a battle to get around this problem. The trick appears to be to right click on the ball, permanently turn off all shields, attempt to reboot, log in as administrator.
Then once rebooted you can do the repair. I did another reboot then, just to be safe.
Turn all shields back on. Rebooted again to be safe.
Logged in as my regular user, and everything is hunky-dory 
So the million-$ question is now why I am I having to do this whole repair song and dance every few days. Now that I know what to do, I can do it fairly quickly, but it still begs the ?. I think each time is after a long heavy session on the internet the previous day. But the software should be able to maintain better control and not become corrupted or whatever.