Stephen Piriform,
I was going to respond to each of your points but realised that I would effectively just be agreeing with Andavari above.
I will say however that despite reading the post several times, I still cannot see how CCleaner phoning home for an IP lookup every 30 or so seconds to give you my ISP and location info can in any way help prevent DDoS atacks aimed at your network.
Anyway, what you say may be perfectly true but I just don't believe anything that comes out of Piriform / Avast any more. I suppose that as I no longer trust CCleaner / Piriform / Avast the only thing I can do is uninstall the product from my machines and mobile devices and move on.
This I have done.