Windows Defender or 3rd party?

@GracieAllen I would be a little leery of a vendor telling you to shutdown your AV protection, even if it's just for testing.

"When I related the situation in the Adobe forum, they recommended completely shutting off whatever antivirus I'm using to see if that fixed the problem.
Which in this case would be Windows Defender."

If Defender is all you have running, and the Adobe product has issues with it, I would tend to believe it's the Adobe product, not Defender. If you manage to completely disable/shutdown Defender, you have nothing. Looking to switch to a different AV to solve the Adobe issue doesn't sound right to me. Shutting down the only AV protection you have, certainly doesn't sound right.

There must be more to this. What Adobe product is it?

lolnothankyou said:

If you don't need a real-time protection (I haven't seen a virus in like 10 years), you can disable Windows Defender and download Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool instead. KVRT is free, easy to use, standalone and somewhat efficient. Just block it with your firewall so it doesn't call home (or worse).

I would stay away from any Avast products.

@lolnothankyou
Are you seriously suggesting the OP drop all real-time protection, and use a 3rd party tool that is only as current as the last download, if you can download it? And is "somewhat efficient"? And has to be Firewall blocked to avoid calling out with whatever? Really???

Gracie,

I would also suggest a cautious approach. You might be getting bad advice from Adobe's forums.

Real-time protection & the firewall are the active parts of WD so turning them off will allow you to see if there is any difference without getting complicated about things. Just see if there is anything at all to the suggestions you got in the Adobe forums before you consider anything else -

1. Disconnect from the internet,
2. Disable WD real-time protection [WD, Virus & thread protection, V&TP settings, Real-time protection - Off],
3. Assuming that you are connected to your home network, turn off the WD firewall [WD, Firewall, Public/Private network {whichever says Active}, Firewall - Off],
4. Run the Adobe product,
5. Decide if there is any difference at all,
6. Re-enable WD real-time protection,
7. Turn on the WD firewall,
8. Reconnect to the internet,
9. Return to this forum & post your results.

If there is anything at all in the Adobe forum suggestions then it means Adobe have issued a product that is not Windows-compatible. Personally, I expect that your test will reveal that turning off WD made no difference.

Best of luck,
Denis

Try3 said:

Gracie,

I would also suggest a cautious approach. You might be getting bad advice from Adobe's forums.

Real-time protection & the firewall are the active parts of WD so turning them off will allow you to see if there is any difference without getting complicated about things. Just see if there is anything at all to the suggestions you got in the Adobe forums before you consider anything else -

1. Disconnect from the internet,
2. Disable WD real-time protection [WD, Virus & thread protection, V&TP settings, Real-time protection - Off],
3. Assuming that you are connected to your home network, turn off the WD firewall [WD, Firewall, Public/Private network {whichever says Active}, Firewall - Off],
4. Run the Adobe product,
5. Decide if there is any difference at all,
6. Re-enable WD real-time protection,
7. Turn on the WD firewall,
8. Reconnect to the internet,
9. Return to this forum & post your results.

If there is anything at all in the Adobe forum suggestions then it means Adobe have issued a product that is not Windows-compatible. Personally, I expect that your test will reveal that turning off WD made no difference.

Best of luck,
Denis

That is a much saner approach, Thank you. Disemboweling Defender simply bothered me.

I agree.

GracieAllen said:

Much like Microsoft, Adobe is the 800 pound gorilla in their playground. And like any 800 pound gorilla the urinate wherever they'd like and virtually nothing is ever their fault. Which means any problem with their software that doesn't cripple at least a million (or some other astronomically large number) of systems, preferably with flames coming out, automatically gets blamed on anything and everything other than the Adobe product.

The problem I'm encountering (without going into a ridiculous amount of detail) is that Lightroom <current version> starts fine, using about 4 - 5 GB of memory (already a huge amount), then as work progresses, it starts slowing, and proceeds to get slower and slower while the memory being use goes up. I've had it gobble over 16 of the 32GB of memory on the desktop and 11 of the 16GB on the laptop when it loses it's mind and things get chaotic - screens blinking on and off, popups you can't respond to, inability to shut down Lightroom or anything else, programs that don't even display in the Task Manager and eventually a black screen or the whole system just crashes.

Since this isn't hitting some astronomical number of users, the first thing to get blamed was the anti-virus.

I'll try disabling as much as I can of WD in the next day or two, put the desktop through some work, and see if it makes any difference.

Thanks for that feedback. This is about the extent of what you can easily disable. Note it says if you do, it will turn itself back on after a while.... Look forward to hearing the tales of the gorilla.....

lolnothankyou said:

If you don't need a real-time protection (I haven't seen a virus in like 10 years), you can disable Windows Defender and download Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool instead. KVRT is free, easy to use, standalone and somewhat efficient. Just block it with your firewall so it doesn't call home (or worse).

That is a seriously irresponsible thing to suggest to anyone.