Solved Antimalware Service Executable: hogging my resources at startup

[Gornot]

Well, the thread says it all. Upon loging into Windows (either after powering on the PC or just using a restart), I can clearly see that the Gadgets take a long time to display on the desktop, even though, of course, the sidebar.exe process is loaded immediately. About a minute or two into the login session most of my RAM is occupied and the CPUs would often jump to more than 80% per core. This is annoying because during that time Windows is very unstable and if I try to run any program on my own (mostly the TV app and/or IE9) they most likely crash or freeze so I would have to kill the process in the Task Manager.

"Antimalware Service Executable" is responsible for this, and at first I thought this was either Windows Defender or Malicious Software Removal Tool activating upon each startup, but no, this is actually Security Essentials. I know that the leaked build of IE9 affects gadgets (that's a different issue) but I am quite sure that it doesn't have anything to do with MSE, because this has been happening across multiple Windows installations with different browsers (before IE9 I didn't use IE8 at all, often I would even turn off the feature).

Has anyone else experienced this? I've been searching around and did mostly see time-out errors for MSE, not something like this. Both MSE and my Windows are always fully updated (some solution just suggested updating lol)
Is there anything I can do to overcome this annoyance?

 

[Jacee]

Do you have OneCare? Is Windows Defender disabled in Services? (it should be)

 

[yowanvista]

I've experienced this last year until I removed MSE

 

[Gornot]

I do not have OneCare installed, and Defender is turned off.

I guess I forgot to mention that alongside MSE I also use Avast 5, if that matters...

 

[SledgeDG]

Make sure that only ONE of the two AV programs is set to real time scan..
This is one of the cases where less is more
Otherwise each and every program that starts with your computer is scanned twice, causing the system load you experience

-DG

 

[fletch]

Even better remove Avast and only use MSE

 

[SledgeDG]

I wouldn't wont to make that decision for him (I use only AVAST and it never let me down so far) but if it comes to that
Here's the official Avast removal Tool but the free version of the Revo uninstaller works too.

-DG

 

[Gornot]

Thank you David
I will give it a shot with real-time scan prefs. Perhaps I can simply uncheck an option in msconfig to have MSE loaded by default at statup, and start it myself manually, it wouldn't be a bother.

Or would you perhaps know how I can turn off MSE's scan at startup, because that's the one that takes a lot of resources upon login.

 

[SledgeDG]

You're very welcome, Marko
Check the MSE Settings for scheduled scans....they're usually set to unorthodox times like 3 am.
If the computer is offline at that point, MSE tries to execute that missed scan at the next start-up.
That might be the point to tinker around with. Set the scheduled scans to more convenient times.
Give it a try and we go from there.

-DG

 

[Gornot]

Yeah, I guess I forgot to set the scheduled scans last time I installed MSE, so it was set to Sunday at 2AM.
Well, I changed that to midnight and unchecked "start the scheduled scan only when my computer is on but not in use". My computer is always in use, lol, even if I'm not doing anything but watching TV, the TV app prevents Windows from idling to sleep, so that may be it.

Will restart now and see how it goes, I just finished a scan so it shouldn't run after restart. Fingers crossed.

UPDATE: Well, that seemed to do the trick quite nicely
Windows itself seems a lot more stable and I can clearly see that the process doesn't hog the CPU. It still takes a bit more memory to start, but that's not a problem since it settles back after no more than a few seconds.
Thanks again, David. I'll mark this as solved.

 

[SledgeDG]

Cool beans
I'm glad that's solved for you, Marko
Thanks for the feedback