Richd

Follow-up / conclusion to my June 22nd post. I sent the GSI report to Support; received back another set of procedures to run through on my machine, but I simply didn't have the time to read through it, understand it, and do it all, so I shelved the entire effort, uninstalled the program, and lived with it for a little while. In the meantime, I noticed the disk usage problem appearing even without Kaspersky running on the machine. I started to suspect the hard drive itself. Using whatever native Windows had to show the SMART data, no problems were found. But the disk usage problem persisted, and I became aware of the "CrystalDiskInfo" program. When I ran that, it showed that the disk had several thousand reallocated sectors! I swapped out the bad hard drive for a new SSD, re-installed Windows, and the problems went away. So it's pretty certain that what appeared to be high disk usage by Kaspersky was in fact the Windows Task Manager attributing what were disk hardware issues to the program. I've re-installed Kaspersky and it's running fine.

I have no official response because I'm still in the middle of their procedures, as I had the problem with the "GSI report" link. But that said, I'm currently not actually having the problem. The sequence of events that led to this are: - Uninstalled Kaspersky (to stop computer from freezing throughout the day) - Installed free version of Bitdefender for two days (needed an AV) - Uninstalled Bitdefender - Reinstalled Kaspersky, high disk usage returned; began following tech support's procedures - Paused protection; disk usage returned to normal - Restarted protection, tried turning off each component of Kaspersky in turn, per their recommendation. Couldn't see any significant change in disk usage problem. As I told tech support, this step is complicated by the fact that the high disk usage comes and goes periodically. - Paused protection to get some work done computer - Some time later (two hours?), restarted protection to see what would happen - And, for whatever reason, at that point the high disk usage did NOT return. That was two days ago, and it hasn't returned since. I've since been able to produce the GSI report, now I have to send it to tech support and see what they say.

Update: I received a response from tech support at 5:30pm on Friday. On Saturday, I tried going through the steps they suggested. I first removed Bitdefender, then re-installed Kaspersky. After re-installation, I experienced the high disk usage. When I paused protection, the disk usage returned to normal. I then re-started the computer, as they suggested. After restarting, the high disk usage returned. Then I began turning off the various components of Kaspersky as they suggested. I couldn't determine any direct relationship between turning off a component and the disk usage returning to normal. This step is complicated by the fact that the high disk usage is intermittent, not continuous, as I use the computer through the day. However - I ended up pausing protection so I could use the computer without interference from the slowdown caused by the high disk usage. At some point later, I resumed protection to see what would happen. At that point, the high disk usage did not return! But I don't have any idea why. Also - tech support collecting a "GSI system information report", but the link provided caused a "too many redirects" errror, so I was unable to. I didn't have time yesterday to google it, but I'll try that today. EDIT: okay, finding out how to run GSI report was trivial. But - I noticed that even the link returned from duck.com causes a "too many redirect" error at first, yet using that link, the page eventually loaded.

@Berny I had an INC number in their first email response. The second email response, a minute later, was the "automated analysis" email I was talking about above. This was at 12:01pm and 12:02 pm yesterday, according to the email times. (don't know what time zone that is, I believe it's EDT but not sure). How long do you mean when you say "quite quickly"?

Update: no response yet from technical support. Does anybody know what the typical response time is? In the meantime, since I uninstalled Kaspersky pending technical support recommendations, I've installed the free version of another security suite to see if it has similar disk usage issues.

So I tried two additional things in the interest of being thorough: 1) I opened a ticket with Kaspersky technical support, describing the high disk usage problem in a fairly long paragraph. Unfortunately, this is the response I got: This is an automated reply generated by our text analysis feature. It's designed to propose solutions after automatically analyzing contents of customers' inquiries. If you reply to this email, it will go straight to one of our support representatives, but we would like to ask you to give this feature a chance to resolve your issue. Application fails to start Well okay. Nobody bothered to read what I wrote. They did an automated "text analysis" on it, and came up with "Application fails to start" as my problem! Ironically, it's almost the exact opposite of my problem, which is that the "Application fails to STOP (using the disk, that is)" So now I have to respond to the email, and tell them their automatic text analysis didn't work, then "wait for the technical support team to contact" me. Okay, I'll try that next. 2) I uninstalled the program. The disk usage has stayed very very low since I did so, and the machine has stopped freezing with the disk usage at 100%. So there's no question at all that it's the Kaspersky application that's the cause of the issue. But before I re-install it, I'll see what technical support has to say.

1) Reading carefully thru the topic we don't see anywhere that Kaspersky is recommending turning OFF Background scan Please see Pica's post, which I referred to. Here's the relevant excerpt: The clean-boot tutorial instructs to disable all 3rd party services, including KIS. It would only prove if there’s something in the system that is dragging down performance independently of KIS. If we wanted to find out if something in the system is influencing KIS, then it should be left running. 2) Presumably, the developers test the software against a large number of configurations. There aren't an infinite number, or even an unduly large number, of causes of this problem. There is likely a very small handful of causes that would cover more than 95% of the cases. 3) The "reinstall" approach is the old standby "solution" that more often than not don't solve the problem, judging from people's experience with this. 4) This problem clearly needs to be investigated by the developers as an effort that's independent of any particular user's experience, rather than the tortuous "one-off" approach that's being taken now. If I were using the free version, I would simply live with this. But as a paying customer, I don't find this approach acceptable, and I'd bet many other paying customers don't either. But perhaps you're right, this is probably not the right place to get this issue resolved. I'll try the route of opening a support ticket based on my current, properly installed software, and see how it goes from there.

I've begun having this high disk usage problem just this week, to a degree that it interferes with the normal operation of the computer. This is marked as having a "solution", however --- the "solution" was to do a clean boot - with no additional details!. But as Pica pointed out, doing a clean boot, and thereby disabling Kaspersky, only proves that if Kaspersky stops running it won't cause the problem This problem is clearly ongoing, as it's just started for me this week, and I see others here from May with the problem. And turning off the background scan is NOT a solution, as that's one of the purposes of the application in the first place. Isn't it possible for your developers to devote some time to this issue and determine what's causing it? With so many people experiencing this problem, surely it can't be that difficult to reproduce.