Thanks to a suggestion from Bill, I found the problem that AvantBlog has been having when attempting to authenticate with the Blogger.com servers… basically they moved their servers!.
As Robert discovered in this post, the server that responds to API requests moved from plant.blogger.com to www.blogger.com, so basically I was posting authentication requests to a server that didn’t exist. This has been rectified now and it appears to be operating properly.
Enjoy your blogging folks 🙂