sudden change in scan time length

A few days ago (last Friday, Sept 15), I noticed that ewido 3.5 took twice as long to run a complete scan (56 minutes, as opposed to the usual 20-25). The results said no infected objects were found.

I ran ewido twice the next day (with about 6 hours between the two scans), and the scan time was still over 45 min each time. I have not installed anything in the meantime that might have created more files.

Does anyone know why this might be or if it is due to an infection of some sort? All of my other anti-malware programs (norton, ewido, ad-aware, spybotS&D, windows defender, panda online scan) say all is clean.

Thanks in advance.

 

Yes, it's a misprint; my apologies. I run only one instance of ewido (free 3.5 version).

 

Have you recently added another security utility which uses resident (real-time) protection? If so, you might want to try "pausing" or even temporarily stopping that other one while scanning with ewido, so you don't in effect have two scans trying to open the same files which takes a lot longer.

 

I have not installed anything except an automatic Windows update.

I also run free ewido 3.5 on my laptop, which has all the same security programs, updates, and patches as my desktop. The scan time there is still around 20-25 minutes. Only the desktop time changed.

 

I noticed something that might be another clue in this mystery: If I disable the screensaver, the scan runs for a normal 20-25 minute period.

This is still odd since I never had to turn the screensaver off before, and my laptop still runs 20-25 minutes scans with the screensaver on.

(both laptop and desktop still use ewido 3.5 free version)

If anyone has any ideas, they would be muchly appreciated.