Avira Free Security quarantining and deleting files

I am having what appears to be a common problem with Avira Free Security Quarantine. Real-time protection is active and has quarantined over 1000 files that I know are not infected. This started happening when I installed Avira Free Security on January 11th. Within a day or two, files starting disappearing into the quarantine that were not infected. When I realized what was happening, I restored them only to have Avira re-quarantine them within seconds and duplicate some of them.

After an hour of restoring and Avira instantly re-quarantining files, even out of its own Restored folder, I finally gave up and let them stay there while I figured out what to do. Even though every day, non-infected files have been quarantined from my computer.

Today, I plugged in a flash drive and files started disappearing from it. Then a notice from Avira appeared saying they were suspicious files and moved to quarantine! Again, these were never infected. But this time when I went to quarantine to restore them, the quarantine was empty! And as I am writing, I am getting constant notifications that files are being quarantined. But they are not showing up in the quarantine.

There are now so many files missing, I don't know what they all are, but I need all of them back. I am now afraid to turn on my computer because I will lose more files. I can't back it up either, because Avira immediately scans external drives without my permission and quarantines files.

I have Avira Free Security Version 1.0.45.15812 and I am using it on my Windows 7 computer. Because Real-time protection is active and cannot be disabled, I have never deliberately run a scan because I don't want the anti-virus to find more to quarantine. So any help you can provide would be appreciated.

Thank you.