NOD32 3.0 issues with Vista--and a farewell!

I am not sure how exactly ESET NOD32 3.0 (latest version -- .669) got to conflict with so many programs on my Vista Ultimate platform...for the past 2-3 months the CPU usage was very high, Windows Explorer frequently crashed or froze, and often third-party programs like Skype, which used to work alright, would not load at all or freeze at loading. I monitored a bit more carefully my running processes and found out that NOD32 was usually responsible for a higher CPU usage or a temporary "freeze," whenever I opened Windows Explorer. I decided to remove NOD32 temporarily, in order to see what and how will change...well, this is when the REAL problems began--after I uninstalled NOD32, Vista would crash at startup, giving me a jolly "blue screen," and only after several re-installations, including one where I purposefully downgraded to 2.7, it would eventually "forget about" NOD and finally allow me to have my system back.

And, guess what, after the NOD32 uninstallation, all seems to be going well--there are no crashes, no freezes, no abnormal CPU usage. No viruses either--after removing NOD32, I used Kaspersky Online Scanner, Avast Home 4.8, AntiSpyware 4, and Ad-Aware 2008 to check thoroughly my disk, and found nothing worth mentioning besides a few cookies. Which brings me to my point: Vista Ultimate apparently does not like NOD32 very much and in my case, no matter what I did, I could not avoid the freeze/crash/CPU overload issues which plagued me after I installed NOD 3.0. Curiously, I HAD NONE of these issues to report when I used NOD 2.7 with Vista Ultimate...

I had NOD32 as the only anti-virus solution (added Ad-Aware 2008 a bit later). Right now I am using avast! 4.8 and will not venture back into NOD32, even though I have a valid subscription for many months ahead. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that NOD32 3.0 has more compatibility issues with Windows Vista than its predecessor (version 2.7)...

 

I'm not seeing any of these problems on Vista, I have the Home Premium version and installed my copy of NOD32 3.0.669.0 onto it without any issues.

I installed it with the defaults, have you got yours set with the defaults or have you altered any settings in the program ?

So far Vista is running very well and there are no conflicts with the anti virus program at all.

 

Maybe a log from ESET SysInspector would reveal something suspicious in the list of installed programs.

 

is it 64bit?

 

It is not 64 bit...the strange thing is that I had no such issues, while using NOD32 2.7.

It seems to me that one of the Vista updates might have "set" NOD 32 on guard. I have been using the default settings and have not tweaked anything. On the other hand, however, why would version 2.7 work flawlessly for a few months, and then 3.0 would cause so many issues.

 

It could be something really simple like checking or unchecking the right radio button in set up. I had an unrelated issue with v3.650 until it was suggested I make an adjustment in the set up tree. Rather than give up, maybe you should share all the symptoms with the experienced folks here and possibly find the fix.