I noticed my applications were taking far too long to open, so I pop open task manager and Antimalware Service Executable was going absolutely berserk--almost max write disk usage to the C:/ drive (50-80 MB/s) and 30-35% of my CPU.
I fixed the issue by ultimately excluding my C:/ drive, the system disc, but that doesn't really answer why it happened and what the . I ran a full scan hoping it might sate its sudden desire to eat up resources, but that didn't stop it. Occasionally it eased down for less than a minute only to ramp up dramatically in its disk usage. Because Microsoft is hellbent on making their system settings and control panel all paired down and App-like simple there's no clear way to figure out what Windows Defender was up to.
Has anyone else run into this problem as of late?
