AdWatch: Slows Other Program Starts Too Much

Hello. I [i]was[/i] running Ad-Watch Live ("AWL"), version 8.3.0, as part of Ad-Aware Free ("AAF"). I discovered that AWL was slowing the startup times of legitimate programs too much, so I recently disabled the "live" portion of AAF.



Here are the details:



I have been running Fookes software NoteTab Light ("NTL") as my default plain-text editor for years. You can find a description of the various versions of NoteTab here - [url="http://www.notetab.com/"]http://www.notetab.com/[/url] - and you can find download links for the versions here - [url="http://www.notetab.com/downloads.php"]http://www.notetab.com/downloads.php[/url] . Recently, I upgraded NTL from version 6.12 to 6.20. 6.2 seemed to take an inordinately long time to start, and so I contacted Fookes software, with whom I exchanged several emails. Eventually, I wrote a program to time load times, i.e., determine the time interval (in hundreths of a second) between a "run" command and a program's display of its first window (showing that it was then, so to speak, open for business). For version 6.12, this was, consistently, about 3 seconds on my PC*; for 6.2, this was, consistently, about 9 seconds.



Fookes informed that there was no change to their product that should have resulted in this increased load time. After experimentation, I discovered that the problem was AWL. Disabling that run-time module of AAF resulted in consistent NTL (either version) load times of about 0.4 - 0.9 seconds. I stress that this change alone - removing AWL - was sufficient to get these dramatically reduced load times; similarly, then merely re-running AAL/AWL was sufficient to once again result in NTL's unacceptably long load times. Put another way, I experimented with my other anti-virus (and other) software (Trend Micro), disconnected from the Internet, and so on and so forth, and all of these had no effect at all.



So, this brings me to the following questions:



1) Is anyone else - particularly anyone at Lavasoft - aware of this problem, i.e., AWL's [i]significant[/i] slowdown of the startup process of legitimate programs?



2) Is there a mechanism in AWL - in either free or paid versions - to "white list" programs, or otherwise instruct AWL to ignore specified program startups?



Barring any changes to AWL, making my .TXT-associated editor take about an extra 8 seconds to load is simply too high a penalty for me to countenance; hence, my disabling of the run-time portion of AAF/AWL.



Regards,



Bill Pollack

NY, USA





* My PC:



Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit), with all patches

Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.4GHz

3GB RAM

6GB - 6GB virtual memory (i.e., fixed size)

300GB hard drive (53% free)

PerfectDisk11 defrag software (nightly runs, "Smart Placement")



(Similar ratios were obtained on my laptop, although all results were slightly faster: Intel i3 CPU, 4GB RAM, etc.)