BleachBit Installer + Windows 7 + Symantec Antivirus 10.2 = CPU pegged.

Forums: 
Forum tags: 

Don't know where exactly the problem lies here but on my Lenovo W500 running Windows 7 (Enterprise) and Symantec AV 10.2, the presence of the installer causes pegged CPU issues. For example, just opening the C:\Downloads folder which contains the BleachBit installer starts the CPU up. Trying to click on it and choose Properties for example pegs the CPU for a solid minute or so if not longer. Some time it will never return until I start killing off the explorer.exe process. Although the explorer.exe process claims all the CPU, this is related to SAV 10.2. Disabling the Auto-Protect completely prevents this problem from occurring. Interesting thing is that I haven't found another executable yet that causes this. Only the BleachBit installers (0.7.0 through 0.7.2 tested) cause this behavior.

Thanks for the report. I haven't heard of any similar. BleachBit 0.7.0 - 0.7.2 uses the popular NSIS installer system (version 2.45). Keep an eye out in case any of the other NSIS installers have the same behaviour. I'm not hopeful, but maybe if I upgrade to NSIS 2.46 for the next BleachBit release it would help.

BleachBit also uses UPX for executable compression which could confuse some antivirus software, though it's a stretch for the antivirus software to notice it at the level of c:\downloads\

---
Andrew, lead developer

If it helps, I've got a number of other installers in the same folder (Picasa, FileZilla, Firefox, etc) but none of these cause problems. I did notice however thought that they all report as being NSIS 2.38 or 2.42. I was able to find and download installers for InfraRecorder and a demo of StuntMANIA which both use NSIS 2.45. Both of these also peg the CPU in a similar way (although InfraRecorder doesn't do it was badly but it is still noticeable. Don't suppose you know of anything offhand that uses 2.46? I'd be interested in trying that too.

Well, NSIS 2.46 itself probably uses NSIS 2.46. :) In any case, this sounds like a bug in the Symantec Antivirus: maybe Norton could look in to it. If you think about it, it is like a denial-of-service (DOS) attack on your computer if that's all it takes to make it malfunction.

---
Andrew, lead developer