AmyGNYC I apologize for the late reply; I've been away from the forums for a couple weeks. If you still need help, please create a new admin Windows account and try playing there. Make it local, as in, don't link it to your Microsoft account or any email address. (You can keep saying you don't have the info until you're asked some security questions instead.) The point is that the issue might be something about your main account, and this would get around it.
Please test with Avast disabled, at least at first, just to make sure it doesn't interfere. If this works, you can reenable Avast again and test, twice and with a computer restart in between, to see whether Avast does get in the way or not. An antivirus can break permissions within an account, but that's not the only way this kind of problem could happen.