Oh god, that's exactly what I have. There's nothing we can do short of disabling defender? Are there AVs that are as secure and don't slow explorer down as much?
Defender is probably the least offensive AV in existence, sadly.
Frankly I think the entire concept of AV is bankrupt as it always causes many more problems than it is worth. Both false positives and false negatives are common. You shouldn't be afraid of running without Defender because, like all AV, it isn't very good at catching real threats anyway. If you really want to feel safe there are much better ways of doing that, like running untrusted programs in sandboxes or VMs, or using Software Restriction Policies to whitelist what can and cannot run. I haven't played with it at all, but there's even Controlled Folder Access to limit FS rights by application, which isn't a terrible idea given the era of crypto-ransomware.
I ran without any AV for years and never had any issues. Intelligent web use is generally a better protectant than AV programs. I use Defender now, grudgingly.
As you say, CFA is probably the most useful part of Windows Defender. I was very glad to see that included.
Presumbly there may have one time been some type of malware that executed through thumbnails with embedded data or some other type of convoluted nonsense that the scanners had to protect against. I think I'd rather take the risk of that though over the accumulated production loss of watching explorer hang for 5 seconds everytime I open a large folder
That's accurate. And I will say that I've seen it hang for as long as fifteen minutes opening up my Downloads folder - which isn't all that big really.
