Malwarebytes Free Version - Full Scan Takes 'forever'

Hardware #1:
HP laptop 17-BY1053DX - Windows 10 Home Version 21H2
Intel Core I5 8265U with 8GB RAM

Hardware #2:
ASUS K52F-BBR9 - Windows 7 in the past, now Windows 10 Home Version 21H2;
Intel Core i3-370M @ 2.40GHz with 8GB RAM

This problem has been around for several years. It has occurred on both machines and for hardware #2 it has occurred under both Windows 7 and Windows 10. Out of curiosity, I finally decided to post about it.

When I run a Malwarebytes scan for the ENTIRE C drive & check all configuration items including scan for rootkits, the scan runs for many hours and I eventually stop the scan. Note that as the scan progresses, the Malwarebytes memory image continually grows until it consumes all of available memory and the scan runs slower and slower and slower. It could run for hours and never finish. Memory leak??

So I execute multiple scans where each scan looks at a select group of folders that I manually select. This works fine and I can do the entire C drive on both machines in under 1 hour using this method.

Note that this problem cannot be due to malware. Hardware #2 had this problem under Windows 7. When I installed Windows 10 on that machine, I wiped the hard drive and installed a cleam version of 10 and the problem still occurs.

Has anyone else seen this issue? Any thoughts?

 

Thank you for the info. Much appreciated.

 

Also clean your drive of useless files, that should shorten the scan. Temps, recycle bin, I empty the prefetch too.
System Ninja - https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/system_ninja.html