ESET SS and excessive disk thrashing

Looking at a PC for a customer today who has been using ESET SS for over a year now. Recently it appears the PC has slowed right down. Watching the PC it appears the hard drive is constantly trashing all the time. Even when the Task Manager shows 99% CPU free and there is bearly anything starting up with the PC.

Removed ESET SS (even that took in excess of 15 minutes) and the PC is back to normal.

Download the latest ESET SS and all is OK until it updates, then all of a sudden the thrashing is back. The hard drive light is just on solid. No amount of time seems to stop the problem. Opening IE can take 5 minutes to get the home page (MSN)

She's even said she sometimes opens Internet Explorer, goes off to do something and pops back occassionally to see if it opened yet....

Any ideas?

 

Is it possible it's doing a system scan? I've found that they some times can take quite a long time to finish.

 

I am wondering if it is the same challenge I am having.
It started for me about a month ago.
Don't know if it is my hard drive or some software that is causing the thrashing which comes along with a slightly grating sound.
If it is Smart Security that is going though a scan when opening or closing files, I am not sure as I have not removed SS.
Just wondering if I am having the same problem as was expressed by the original poster of this thread.
KOR-

 

Maybe system startup file check is enabled to start after every successful update of the virus signature database.

It never hurts to go through the scheduler just to see what's activated (or not) .

 

The StartUp Scan thing was disabled immediately as it tends to kill some lower spec PCs.

Secondly the icon doesn't indicate anything going on.

 

That "slight grating sound" concerns me, Stargate. Obviously I can't hear what you're talking about, but if it's different from the sounds you are accustomed to hearing on the same hard drive, there is a very good chance that your physical drive is failing. Back up your data and prepare to replace your disk soon. If you don't, you could very well wake up to the so-called "click of death" where your drive no longer even presents itself to the computer for reading.

There are ESET problems, but this doesn't sound like one of them.

 

Thank you, I agree.
KOR-