Not responding happens with several programs

[bintyre]

Using Windows 10 and have used Avast Free for many years.  Lately programs have been locking up with Not Responding.... have to wait a minute or two before it clears.  Happens with Wordpad, Firefox, Thunderbird and Windows programs too.  Drivers are up to date, scanned for malware, etc., etc., and nothing seems to help.  I did read on a forum that sometimes anti-virus programs can cause this error.  Any thoughts?  Thanks.

[bob3160]

Using Windows 10 and have used Avast Free for many years.  Lately programs have been locking up with Not Responding.... have to wait a minute or two before it clears.  Happens with Wordpad, Firefox, Thunderbird and Windows programs too.  Drivers are up to date, scanned for malware, etc., etc., and nothing seems to help.  I did read on a forum that sometimes anti-virus programs can cause this error.  Any thoughts?  Thanks.

Windows 10 which version? How much Ram? What other security programs are running?
When things are slow, have you looked at Task Manager to see what's hogging your resources?

[DavidR]

Using Windows 10 and have used Avast Free for many years.  Lately programs have been locking up with Not Responding.... have to wait a minute or two before it clears.  Happens with Wordpad, Firefox, Thunderbird and Windows programs too.  Drivers are up to date, scanned for malware, etc., etc., and nothing seems to help.  I did read on a forum that sometimes anti-virus programs can cause this error.  Any thoughts?  Thanks.

I use all of the programs you mentioned (I highlighted) also win10 Home, latest update and I'm not seeing that. 

Firefox (latest regular release version), I use a lot during the course of the day and helping out on the forums, when I might have 10 or more tabs open or pinned.

Thunderbird is my default email client and that is currently running thunderbird version 91.1.

Whilst I have used WordPad (which should be pretty light), my default Office software is LibreOffice and I would imagine that would be a bit heavier than WordPad.

This is all under Avast Free 21.5.2470 (build 21.5.6354.680) I didn't feel the need to update to 21.6 and I'm still considering if I need 21.7 no bugs or functions that I need.