Slow Starting Programs

[gmdoran]

Hi,

I'm running a program called Strat-o-matic Baseball.  After clicking on the icon to load it the program will take upwards of 5-7 minutes to load.  While this is happening you can't do anything on the computer for a period of time as the screen is just frozen.  Then when it frees up(the program still hasn't loaded) taskmanager shows anywhere from 50-90% cpu usage which slows everything down but you can't see what program is using all the cpu.  Then finally the game screen shows up.  Up till that time you don't know if the program is loading, crashing, hasn't started loaded or anything.

I've heard that other people running the same game are experiencing similar loading times and they all seem to be using McAfee as their antivirus protection.  It has been claimed that if you uninstall McAfee the program loads almost immediately.  Others using Norton don't experience this either.

Another thing that lend credence to McAfee as the cause is that after the initial load you can close the program and re launch it and it loads almost immediately...like it has scanned whatever files it needed to the first time and doens't need to the second one.

Does anyone have any ideas on why this would occur or have any way of testing it other than simply removing McAfee all together to test it?  Thanks for any help you can provide.

gmdoran

[gmdoran]

Hi,

Just an update on my problem.  It seems that the reason for the slow startup is the "real time Scanning"  If you turn that off the program launches immediately.  With the scanning turned off however I get the notice that I'm not fully protected.  Not all my programs start up this slow.  So what is it about certain programs that McAfee is scanning that won't allow them to startup in a reasonable amount of time?  Is there a way to exclude them from scanning every time you launch them?

Norton and other virus scanning programs don't seem to have this problem.  They also have the ability for exclusion folders which McAfee has seen fit to remove from their non corporate versions.(foolishly I might add as many of us would like this feature).

[ajacobs]

I am not a product expert but I've moved your post into our Home User area. Hopefully someone can help you soon.

[Dinz]

Hi gmdoran,

Please provide us certain information about the computer such as ;

What is the operating system ? and the RAM size ?
How old is the computer ? What is the version of virus scan & DAT  in security center ?
And lastly let me know when you open security center whether it states Am I protected YES or Your computer is secure .

Kindly let us know the following information so that we could proceed accordingly

Regards,
Dinesh K

[gmdoran]

Hi,

I have McAfee and Strat-o-matic baseball running on two machines.

Operating System on one is Vista Home 64bit and the other is winxp service pack3

Vista computer is less than 1 year old the XP is 2003.

Vista Computer has 4gb Ram and XP has 2gb Ram

Virus Scan is v13.15 build 13.15.116 Dat v5935 on both versions

Both Computers say "yes" I am protected.

As stated if I turn off "real time protection" then the program launches immediately.  If "real time protection" is on the program can take past 5 minutes to load.

[gmdoran]

No response since giving the information you requested??

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[CopyRon]

You can try

Right click your red M, Change settings, Real time scanning, Settings, Put a mark in Programs and documents only.

This will not affect your scheduled scans.

[gmdoran]

Ron,

Thanks for the response.  No go.  I'm starting up a program called "strat-o-matic baseball"  the executeable is SomBB.exe so it is a program hence it still gets scanned or something that is taking a long time to do.  My 3 license McAfee will be up later this year and I'm afraid that I may be forced to change.  McAfee is doing things that other virus programs such as Norton, AVG ect are not and it seems to now be effecting system performance and giving out alot more false positives than it did in the past.  Norton and others give the home user the ability to exclude file and programs from being checked.  You would think that somehow Security Center would know if a file has not been changed and would exclude it automatically from being scanned again unless the file had changed.

6 minutes or more just to launch my program is totally unacceptable.  I've taken to shutting off the real time scanning just before I go to startup the program.  The 30 seconds it takes me to do that saves me 4 or 5 minutes in the long run.

McAfee used to be good but they've stopped listening to their user base.