Skipping the original "US goes completly psycho" scenario, the Cold War can be avoided several ways, depending on how close you want the TL to be to ours and how far back you want to put the POD.
1.) No WWII. Germany slowly rebuilds it's military under a less wacky government and Stalin never works up the noive to try and conquer all Europe. Winning a smaller war vs Japan and Communizing Manchuria and Korea fails to remove the impression in his countrymen's minds that he's most notable for erecting enormous mounds of corpses, and de-Stalinization after his death is much more thorough.
2.) No Stalin in the first place. This could go several different ways, since WWII probably goes differently, and may not happen at all. (If Hitler decides to attack France first rather than a Poland that has received guarantees from the USSR, or decides to invade anyway in spite of Soviet warnings and the French at his back, the generals might work up the courage to do what they failed to do OTL in 1944).
3.) Hitler wins, kinda. The Soviets collapse, but the Reich eventually falls to US forces armed with nuclear weapons. The remnants of the Soviet government move west over the Urals and eventually reoccupy most of their pre-1939 territory, but the USSR has been too badly depopulated to seriously challenge the US, and Stalin has not survived. The US has no real opposition. (OTOH, this could go badly if the US decides it can return to isolationism).
4.) Stalin dies during WWII. A car accident, a lucky bomber, flees Moscow in a German breakthrough and suffers a vote of no confidence (in the back of the neck)...someone less paranoid and wacky takes his place, and the postwar arrangements are different. This one has some sub-possibilities:
a. As mentioned earlier in the thread, a Finlandized E. Europe rather than the direct OTL takeover.
OTOH, a Finlandized Eastern Europe requires, well, some common borders. Would Finlandized Poland allow Soviet troops to cross it's territory to smack the Germans if they try to rearm? So, perhaps
b. Poland is actually Communized. Poland is, Soviets point out, a traditional Russian sphere of influence. And hey, you know, their government between the wars was pretty much Fascist? Polish voters may not like it, but it might still be little enough to avoid a confrontation.
c. Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria are taken over, but the leadership successfully negociates a "buffer" of neutralized, disarmed states - Germany, Austria, the Czech republic. (This lowers tensions, but unfortunately leads to the Fourth Reich in the 1990's

)
Unfortunately, even if we avoid confrontation in Europe, there are still two things which could lead to serious US-Soviet tensions...
I.) There is the problem of Asia - our alti-Soviet leadership getting all of Korea at the negociating table avoids the Korean war provocation, but what of Mao? China going Red was one of the major contributions to the Cold War scare. Still, an effort by Soviet and Chinese propagandists to portray the Chinese revolution in a positive light might do some good - as it was, OTL a lot of people were dubious about saving Chiang, who was considered too corrupt to be a credible leader of China, and there were a fair number of respectable "useful idiots" willing to portray Mao as merely a "agrarian reformer" or whatever.
II.) There is the Bomb. Even under a more peaceful leadership, the desire to have one of their own will be strong - after all, they're still _communists_, and don't really trust the Very Capitalist USA - and when they get one, the US may freak out a bit. Much depends on whether the OTL US Red Scare has been able to get any traction - if by this time the UK has one too, and the Soviets are just considered another country - just a big and vaguely scary one - this might not kick off the sort of military race we got OTL. Some sort of international arms treaty with inspections and such to prevent a nuclear arms race would be the best option, but how likely is it that any Soviet government would be open enough to let US arms inspectors roam around their country - and visa versa?
Bruce