I've had to turn off live protection because I tried to run Firefox and 10 minutes later, there was a stream of live protection tasks on my taskbar and Firefox still was not responding. I had to manually close every one and turn off Live Protection before I could run Firefox again.

I've only got Spybot AV bought and installed today and already, I am beginning to regret buying it.

First thing that happened was I lost my Audio service and Windows couldn't fix the problem. I had to do a system restore and re-install Spybot again.

Then I tried to launch my online game and Live Protection decided it was going to scan all the files, 15 minutes later and the launcher screen was finally displaying. Then, because the launcher decided to download an update, Spybot decided to scan those as well. That's just a few files, imagine if I'd tried to actually play my game which has over 3gb of files There isn't even an option to ignore files run from a specified directory like other AV's I've used.

So I thought, Okay, I'll have a look here and see if any issues like this have been reported. That's when I had the problem with running Firefox.

I already have an AV that does sweet FA unless I manually run a scan, I wanted one that quickly and unobtrusively scans files I try to run. Spybot has always been great and totally unobtrusive for spyware and malware in the past so I decided to give the AV package a shot. What a difference! Now I can't run anything without a substantial wait while it completes it's scans before I can do anything.

Is there some way to prevent all this trouble apart from turning it off completely which sort of defeats the purpose of having it?

It needs to scan in the background but let you get on and then alert you to any threats if it finds any. If there's a virus in the files, it got there without Spybots intercepting it or was there before Spybot was installed and has probably already infected the system. A system scan would have picked that up if it had. The first thing it should do when installed is run a system scan to see if anything has already infected the system then ask the user to do a full file scan to see what file may have put it there. Tagging the files as scanned after teh file scan should then allow the user to run them unless they have been updated but Spybot should intercept the virus during the update anyway so there's no reason to keep scanning it after it's been tagged. If anything, a quick hash scan should determine if the file has been changed since it was last run.