Defender hangs until USB wireless disconnected

[Guest]

I'm just ran a full scan with Windows Defender of my XP Professional machine.
It normally runs very fast, but this time it started pausing - the count of
elapsed time stopped changing, and the path it displayed froze as well.

Task manager reported only a few percent of CPU time busy, and I could
continue
working normally.

I started shutting down services and programs one by one to see what was
causing the problem. When I disconnected the USB wireless connnection, it
started scanning again.

Any clues?

 

[Guest]

This problem is repeatable.

I rebooted, and ran the same scan. Defender hangs several times,
at the same files it did before. As before, disabling the internet
connection causes the scan to go at full speed again.

This time the pauses were not as long - 30 seconds not several minutes - and
I observed internet traffic each time. So it looks like Defender is going
online for
a dozen of my files. But the files it seems concerned with are very ordinary -
some Excel spreadsheets, a word document, an html file I use as my home page).

Why does a simple .html file I wrote myself cause Defender to spend minutes
online, and freeze badly enough that it stops updating it's progress window?

 

[Dave M]

Not positive about that Josh, but I'd think your level of SpyNet membership
would have something to do with it, since the items it finds would be
reported to SpyNet which could have been either busy or offline while your
scan was running. What level of membership do you have now, and what
happens if you change to no membership and then start a scan?

 

[Guest]

Not positive about that Josh, but I'd think your level of SpyNet membership
would have something to do with it, since the items it finds would be
reported to SpyNet which could have been either busy or offline while your
scan was running. What level of membership do you have now, and what
happens if you change to no membership and then start a scan?

I recently turned on the advanced membership.

I guess Defender is behaving as designed.
I still find its interests odd:
- A start page for Firefox.
- An excel spreadsheet containing many pivot tables.
- An OpenOffice document.
- The FTP/SFTP client WinSCP

 

[Dave M]

I'd find that odd myself if running the recommended Quick Scan which covers
only areas where spyware is known to reside. If you've selected a full
scan, then *ALL* areas of the computer are examined. Try a quick scan and
see if that doesn't help with both the speed as well as hesitations. For
me a quick scheduled scan takes about 4-5 minutes, and I back that up with
a full... but only once per month... unless the quick should turn up any
problem.