Hello,
Just thought I'd post a strange issue that has only occurred by the looks since the Nov win10 and 2H22 updates to win10. For a long time I've ran spybot and avira without any issues. Each month I back up my PC in case their are problems from microsoft updates. Recently I noticed that the DNS Client was taking 8% of CPU when my machine was idle. I have a similar install on a VM and on the VM the DNS client was consuming 20% CPU. (host has 16 cores). Uninstalling Avira or returning the hosts file to default appears to correct the issue. The hosts file is only 445k in size so its not overly excessive. Looking through the past messages suggestions were to disable dns cache to fix the issue. While this did correct the issue on the host it broken the VMs as they must use the DNS cache. ie. no dns was possible on the VM. I've tried restoring past backup images that were perfectly fine when created. Upon restoration there are no issues however after a windows update the problem returns. There appears to be some thing with windows updates that may be causing this problem. Same outcomes on a physical host and a VM. My only solution at present is to rely on adguard home deployed on a raspberry pi instead of using the immunization service.

Thought I'd post for those that are having similar issues.