Three days ago (last Friday, Sept 15), I noticed that ewido 3.5 took twice as long to run a complete scan (56 minutes, as opposed to the usual 20-25). The results said no infected objects were found.

I ran ewido twice the next day (with about 6 hours between the two scans), and the scan time was still over 45 min each time. I have not installed anything in the meantime that might have created more files.

Does anyone know why this might be and if it is due to an infection of some sort? All of my other anti-malware programs (norton, ewido, ad-aware, spybotS&D, windows defender, panda online scan) say all is clean.

Thanks in advance.

This post has been edited by CelestialTeardrop: Sep 17 2006, 11:10 PM

not familiar with ewido but maybe it can be configured to do a standard scan (which only checks certain types of files) or a thorough scan which checks every file on your system so would obviously take much longer. You may have changed that without realising it perhaps?

This post has been edited by pip22: Sep 18 2006, 10:52 AM

Hi pip22, thanks for your reply.

I thought so too at first, but when I checked the settings they were the same as before. I also run ewido on my laptop and it still only takes 20ish minutes, so it couldn't have been an updated definitions file or something like that.

I noticed something that might be another clue in this mystery: If I disable the screensaver, the scan runs for a normal 20-25 minute period.

This is still odd since I never had to turn the screensaver off before, and my laptop still runs 20-25 minutes scans with the screensaver on.

(both laptop and desktop use ewido 3.5 free version)

If anyone has any ideas, they would be muchly appreciated.

Have you tried clearing out your temp files and flushing out old restore points and see if that cuts the scan time down bit

Thanks for your reply Saracen. I deleted all restore points and cleaned out temp files using ATF-cleaner, but it made no difference.

If your still experiencing issues I would recomend upgrading to ewido 4.0

Hi Starjax,

I was thinking of upgrading to 4.0 just before I noticed the longer scan times in 3.5. Now I can't bring myself to upgrade until I figure out why the screensaver slows it down so much all of a sudden.

I recall installing a registry fix from Kelly's Korner for system sounds (#6). As soon as I saw that it didn't fix the problem I did a system restore to before I did the tweak. (the issue of no sounds for logon/logoff, not startup/shutdown, was caused by norton) Other than that, I really can't think of any changes to any kind of settings.

having gone from 3.5 to 4 the scan time is signifcantly improved. I can't think of any reason why you should not upgrade to 4.0.

I've heard that the scan time for 4.0 was faster, but I'm worried about what is going on behind the scenes in my comp that is making 3.5 slower than it ever was before.

It's not ewido itself that bothers me, I don't particularly care for the scan time and just let it run while I'm off doing something else. It's more a question of what happened to suddenly case the screensaver to interfere with the scan when it never did before (and still does not bother my other computer).

well make sure you are running an av along with ewido.

Post in the malware forum and see if they can offer with any advice. They will probably want a hijackthis log as well.

Thanks for your replies!

I have Norton Internet Security 2004 (with all updates) running; ad-aware, spybot s&d, windows defender, winpatrol, and spyware blaster are also installed, updated, and run often. I checked out my HJT log, looks clean.