Whitelisting: Interminable and Non-Terminable

Hi all! Love the program, have used it basically as long as I have used computers, which is longer than I care to admit.

This morning I was loading Spybot on a friend's new Asus Transformer (dual-core notebook/tablet). I sometimes cut corners on my own installs, but wanted to give them the full underbody treatment, so to speak.

I have never created a whitelist before, since my computer is usually filled with questionable articles by this time. In this case I could, so I did. This is the only text I'm given by the unsolicited prompt:

Do you want to speed up your system scan by whitelisting all files?

This should only be done if you have a new Windows setup and have not yet connected to the internet, this is the only way you can be certain you have no malware.

I admit to connecting to the internet to download a web browser and this program. Despite this sin, I am growing increasingly angry at the behavior of this part of the program. It has been over four hours on a modern computer which I would expect to finish a full system scan more quickly. But what is truly aggravating is that I cannot stop this process. I'm sitting here with my friend, who's forced to visit me because this potentially delicate operation will not allow them to leave my house, and I'm wondering why an internal list of safe files stored for future scanning is either so critical or so delicate that it will not let me stop.

If there is some logic behind this process, then there absolutely needs to be a much better explanation on the screen which, after all, prompts you to do this. "Takes many hours" and "cannot be halted or the computer shut down by user" are common phrases used by the industry when a program is about to exhibit such behavior.

Disappointed and waiting to be able to leave my house, but thankful very much for the excellent program anyway!

Edit:

This finished with a (conservatively estimated) runtime of 5 hours on a fairly slow but brand-new computer running windows 10. The time does not bother me, as I'm used to machines of these speeds, but I find it totally unacceptable that my machine was effectively hijacked without the slightest warning. Some of us have portable computers that need to go places with us (and sometimes run out of power in 5-hour timeframes), and even the desk-bound sometimes have time-sensitive tasks or restarts required.

Please increase the explication of this process, for the sake of decent programming.

It's been running for more than 7 hours.....but here is the real problem....this is not a new computer.....there was no warning prior to starting that this should not be done on a system more than 30 days old....this system is going on 7 years old. The info offered in the help center stated that the whitelist option will not even be present on a system older than 30 days.

So now....what do I do? how do I "un-whitelist"? How do i stop the program?

OK so i went into task manager and "end task" the process. A message popped up saying you can not stop a whitelist.....and then poof it was stopped and gone....what now?

Hello. :)
Yes, usually the system whitelist isn't shown in Spybot on a system older than 30 days, I'm not sure why it was shown.
You can follow this to remove the whitelist that was created in the seven hours that it ran:
https://www.safer-networking.org/faq...tem-whitelist/