Well, the whole problem of displaying the info on the performed action is not as easy as it may seem.
The files may be accessed at a “very bad moment” - not from a user application, but deep from the operating system itself (since it may be the OS who is loading the implicitly imported libraries). At that moment, the “resources” needed to do some GUI-related operations may be locked by the OS. So, when avast! tries do display the info, it fails and locks up because the API functions it’s calling simply don’t work (in fact, it’s not even the displaying, but just queueing the display requests; btw, it’s not really locked - there should be a 3 minutes timeout - but I guess it won’t help you much).
avast! is trying to use as few OS functions as possible to avoid the possible lockups - but especially on an operating system like Win9x (with a lot of non-reentrant 16bit code) it’s not enough.

I remember Vlk had some ideas on improving this feature… maybe this will push him to implement them ;D