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[StFeder]

For the last several MC versions, I get some big trouble with its startup. 5 seconds after starting MC it gets frozen for half a minute. I’m using WinVista. I tried to find a reason for that via MC log files but I couldn’t find anything strange. Then I noticed that there was a process called “svchost.exe -kbdx” which uses much of the processor time in the first minute after MC starts: up to 50% while MC itself was using a maximum of ~15% during startup. A Google search didn’t help so I tried to kill it. The process was protected. With the help of Process Explorer (which is a nice tool btw) I figured out, that it belongs to the BitDefender suite.

I’ve had some problems with MC and BitDefender some time ago but at one point everything works well for a while. No I’m again able to reproduce this for the BitDefender Internet Security Version 10 and Version 2008 (11). Because it’s the AV-Engine, I think it will be the same for BitDefender AntiVirus and TotalSecurity. For BitDefender 10 I had the same bug under WinXP.

But I finally found a solution for that which allows me to use MC right after starting it without disclaiming virus protection: The BitDefender options for the realtime AV Engine are set to scan EVERY file by default (instead of scanning eg. only program files). There are two way to get rid of the MC startup lag:

1. You can change the AV options to let it scan only programfiles. This was my choice. But I wanted to know exactly what made BitDefender freezing MC. I  couldn’t believe what I found:

2. If you want BitDefender to scan all your files, you can add a rule which lets realtime scanner exclude the “c:\users\[username]\appdata\roaming\j river\media center 12\log.txt ” and there will be no freezing!! Because BitDefender is searching for viruses in a textfile, MC freezes for half a minute - amazingly!!

I’m surprised finding a textfile causing so much trouble. Especially one which is made for solving problems
 

[DarkPenguin]

Neat.  Nice detective work.

[Matt]

If BitDefender makes disk I/O a 100 times slower, it's obviously going to hurt other areas of the program like the database access, UI loading, etc.

I wish there were something JRiver could do to protect against this stuff, because it makes for a bad user experience (and makes us look bad) when standard Windows API calls get really slow because of programs injecting themselves into our process or the system.

[glynor]

Hmmm.... I've long been having a similar freeze just after startup (just like you described -- about 5 seconds after starting it).  I don't use BitDefender, but I do use Symantec Professional A/V.  I wonder if excluding the whole JRiver directory in Docs & Settings would help.

I'll test it tonight and post back...

[marko]

glynor, it's what I've had to do for quite some time now.

It's amazing how fast MC flies without this kind of external interference.

-marko