Could My AV Be..

[HolyOne]

I made a thread earlier (http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11628&st=0&p=58417entry58417) stating that my anti-virus was taking a ridiculous amount of time to complete a regular scan. I also later noticed that basically anything I installed took ages - or simply froze during the scan.

For example, I tried to update iTunes - and it took several hours for it to reach completion - and then it froze. This was the case with most other installations. Installations that normally took minutes were taking hours, or simply not finishing.

Recently, today in fact, I found that SHUTTING DOWN my anti-virus resolved all these installation problems. Since everything works fine when my AV is shut down, I'm wondering, if I install a new one, will it do the same thing? Or is this an issue confined to my antivirus, which is by the way, Webroot AntiVirus?

[Insomniac]

This could absolutely be caused by the antivirus. For instance, many years ago we used CA security suite (it was junk). When playing Doom 3, levels took rediculous amounts of time to load. I'm talking around 5 minutes just to load a single level. Disable the antivirus, and it would take about 30 seconds.

There could be many reasons why your AV is interfering: It may just be bad, buggy software. Somthing may have gotten corrupt. It may have compatibility issues with your other software, hardware or drivers.

It is very likely this is a software issue and that switching antivirus's will solve it. Antivirus SHOULD NOT cause that sort of interference. It is acceptable for it to slow down a system if it is running an on-demand scan, but the realtime unit should not slow it down to such a level.

I use AVG 8 and it doens't slow things down much exept when doing a scan. AVG works fine for me, but from what others have said it isn't the best. For a fast, low resource antivirus the most reccommended seems to be Avira. Just make sure you completely get rid of your current AV and reboot before installing.

[exile360]

Since you're using SpySweeper I'd recommend using Webroot's Removal Tool to remove it from your system (if you're going to be switching to a different AV).