I just opened my Avast Premier 2015 interface and see the phrase “1346 karma” next to my email address.
Can someone tell me what this is? I don’t want to click on it in case it should be a username. It’s not something I would have selected and I have a strong password.
It’s fine… search for Karma it’s been answered a hundred times. Just a point rating system for you and your interaction with avast
Lots of avast info to be found in FAQ section 
https://www.avast.com/en-eu/faq.php?article=AVKB184#artTitle
avast FAQ https://www.avast.com/en-eu/faq.php
videos https://www.avast.com/en-eu/faq.php?q=video#searchForm
I would prefer if Avast kept their products “lean and mean” instead of adding more and more bloat. It’s not a big deal, but the code to perform all this stuff is needlessly taking up memory.
Do a custom install and uncheck what you feel you don’t need - avast has always been highly configurable and that hasn’t changed.
Even if you don’t do a custom install - much of this stuff as you call it will be dormant unless you run it, in which case it won’t be using system resources.