I also use Avast and have never had a problem with it. . .until yesterday! It updates its database on startup, and apparently it arbitrarily decided that a program I have had on my desktop since '06 (Screenhunter) had a virus and so it deleted it. I went into the Virus Chest and tried to restore it and add it to the exclusion list and it simply would not do it. Each time I reinstalled that program from the file downloaded in '06, it deleted it again. Finally I turned off Avast, reloaded ScreenHunter and copied the location on my computer, and then restarted Avast and simply typed the location into the Avast exclusion list manually, and that solved the problem. Have no idea why it would not do that when I clicked on it in the Virus Chest and chose Restore and Add to Exclusion List, but it would not.
Newly