Opera Vulnerable?

[mohansg]

mohansg last edited by

I have recurring problem with heavy disk usage (DU), that slows down the PC and also freezes it.
While trying to pin point the cause of the heavy DU, I narrowed it down to Norton Security soft ware. It looks like it, when I turn off Norton temporarily and the problem seemed solved.
I also uninstalled Opera (it uses a lot of Memory) and loaded it back.
The problem persist, heavy DU and the PC freezes.
I uninstalled Opera again, this time with delete all personal record option, and again loaded it back.
This time there was no heavy DU. Task Manager shows all process within the normal range.
Could Opera be infected with something that causes the Anti-virus to work the PC to death?

[burnout426]

burnout426 Volunteer @mohansg last edited by burnout426

@mohansg said in Opera Vulnerable?:

Could Opera be infected with something that causes the Anti-virus to work the PC to death?

It's possible. But, I'd assume it was just the case of the profile folder and cache folder (see opera://about for the locations) being large (taking up a lot of hard drive space). Do you ever clear Opera's history and at least clear the cache?

It could be some corruption on that part of your hard drive caused by the drive going bad. You can hceck that with https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/.

You should also be able to configure Norton to exclude Opera's profile folder and cache folder from scanning if you want.

[mohansg]

mohansg @burnout426 last edited by

@burnout426
@burnout426
Thank you, burnout426 for you reply.
I am weary of downloading any free software anymore.
So I check my HD with chkdsk, without any parameter specified. No problems were found with the HD, nor anything need to be done.

The heavy DU and PC freezing still prevail, despite uninstalling Opera and reinstalling. I thought that solved the problem, but it was not the case.
On further monitoring I found the following:

1. All browsers (Edge, Firefox, Opera) uses a lot of Memory space, but not Disk space.
2. Norton Security is highlighted by Task Manager as one of the heavy users of computer resources, CPU, Memory and Disk.
3. System also is also highlighted.
4. There are scores of background processes and Windows processes that uses Disk space ranging from 0.1 to 0.8 MB/s.
5. Norton Antivirus has found two "bad" files and removed them. I don't know if "bad" means corrupted files or malicious files. They were nvspcap64.dll and shlxthd_x64.dll, they are not viruses.
6. Heavy DU do slow down the PC at times, but it passes soon enough. Its only on YouTube that the PC freezes. When it freezes, it sometimes free itself after a few minutes, sometimes not, and I have to force boot.

I still have not pinpoint what actually causes the freezing of my PC, It started happening only recently, about three weeks ago.

My apologies if I have cast any aspersion on Opera.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Norton is a well known trouble maker and should never go near a pc