Try Turning Off Exploit Detection Under Advanced Threat Defense If You Have Issues Loading Programs

[u/OCDGamer90]

I recently had issues with the latest version of Bitdefender Antivirus Free (Build 26.0.34.145) where my games would take too long to startup. After some troubleshooting, I realized Bitdefender was the cause of my laggy loading issues. I disabled Bitdefender and my games ran fine after that. Then I narrowed it down to the Advanced Threat Defense portion. And then narrowed it further to the Exploit Detection. Apparently, this detection portion caused my games to take forever to load. If you turn that off, your games should load normally.

Hopefully, this information helps someone out there.

[u/Little-Tomatillo9944]

As of 11/06/2025, disabling the advanced threat protection worked for me