Installed the latest RC3 two days ago and, much to my relief, the avastsvc.exe problem had gone!
When booting, the PC now takes about a minute longer - seems to delay PrivateFirewall for most of that time (oh, and the new Avast takes about 20MB more RAM - minor point).
For some reason, 40tude Dialog won’t connect to the usenet server unless I disable Mail Shield - any ideas please?
I recently tried BitDefender. It uses about 100MB more RAM than Avast does! However, something like a spreadsheet in LibreOffice boots in 10s; with Avast it’s 15s. Didn’t like BD though.