Has anyone gotten the Windows 7 Action Center, your antivirus (avast!) is out of date, click me to fix this problem thing to work? Whenever it happens, I click the Action Center icon, click on the my AV is out of date issue, click through the security prompt, but nothing happens. I always end updating through the avast! GUI.
First, ensure your system date is correct, day/month/year and adjust as required.
So what happens when you update through the UI, presumably that works ?
In which case it appears that the auto update isn’t working, but your firewalls don’t have outbound protection (XP, none, Vista’s is off by default), so they shouldn’t be getting in the way.
Have you changed the avast Settings, Update, virus definitions and engine settings ?
Everything is set fine, date, time, firewalls, etc. It’s just that I have my computer on for quite some time offline, and when I go back online, it doesn’t check immediately, but the windows 7 action center picks it up right away. If I leave it, avast! will eventually update automatically, but it seems that trying to update through the windows 7 action center doesn’t work. I’m on 64-bit if that matters.
Well for the security center to have a whinge about your AV being out of date, I believe that the virus definitions have to be older than 7 days. I’m guessing you don’t have it off-line for 7 days or longer ?
I don’t know how the security center would actually action an update through avast, given avast’s self-defence would probably block outside programs using avast services.
Personally I wouldn’t use the security center to even try to initiate an avast update, as you say avast does automatically check for updates once a connection is established.
stopping and restarting avast services (in computer management) should solve your issue. I had to do it earlier today because the action center would detect that the AV was turned off, and it wasn’t of course; that’s a bug in the way Avast communicates with Windows, no big deal, as long as you know that your AV is in fact on and updated.
ps: action center suggests to turn on and update avast but it can’t do it, so no need to worry about the consequences 
I had such issues also. Sometimes booting. Sometimes uninstall/install avast is required. Don’t ask me why…