Arduino IDE incompatible with Panda Cloud Antivirus, slow startup solution

just made an interesting discovery while trying to (yet again) work out why the arduino IDE starts up so slowly on my eMachines EM-350 netbook (without bluetooth) running WinXP, SP3.

through much tinkering, i found that turning OFF my anti-virus software, Panda Cloud Antivirus (free version), allows the arduino IDE to start up and work correctly.

with the anti-virus software turned on, the arduino IDE takes several minutes to start, and pops up a Launch 4J error message part way through at about the 1 minute mark. during this time, using windows task manager, i can observe the following:

  1. the process "javaw.exe" consumes minimal cpu time (<5%)
  2. the anti-virus process "PSANHost.exe" consumes between 40% and 75%

with the anti-virus software turned off, the arduino IDE starts up in less than 30 seconds, without any Launch 4J error message. during this time task manager shows:

  1. "javaw.exe" consuming around 45% of cpu time
  2. "PSANHost.exe" consuming 0% - expected, as Panda is turned off

note - the computer is relatively slow, with a 1.6GHz atom processor.

SO... if you are having trouble with slow start up of the arduino IDE, try turning off your anti-virus software and see if this fixes the problem... and please do report your results back here.

oh, and i'd not recommend turning off anti-virus software as anything other than a once-off experimental solution!! be sure to turn it back on once you've finished the experiment.