9.5.20 - Taking ages to exit?

I did some research on A/V alternatives tonight. PassMark (the same place that creates the benchmarking software I use) rated Norton Security as the least system-impactful. I dropped Avast -and- MalwareBytes, installed Norton, and man, my system has not gotten through the login/startup sequence so fast in a while. Avast and MBAM were dragging it way down, methinks. Multiple tries, too. It’s seriously so much faster, it’s not funny.

Cubase is a good deal more sprightly, especially on anything to do with VSTs. Quitting is back to the normal 1-2 seconds, instead of 1-2 minutes.

I believe I found the problem(s).

Sounds like you got there…good news!
A/V can be tricky as they seem to affect different systems differently. I have Malware Bytes on all three of my PCs and whilst I don’t see a Cubase hit on any of them I do know that on my LapTop it hogs resources hugely when I first turn the LapTop on.

Its reshuffling regarding resources every year with virus scanners. But I’ve been very happy with ESET the last 10 years or so. But whatever scanner you might use, make sure to exclude all data paths for scanning that contain data that Cubase uses.

Got tired of paying Symantec a few years ago… Windows Defender (Win 10) seems to do an amicable job for free. Still, I have to back it up occasionally with Spyhunter, which catches all the browser based crud. Overall, saving money compared to the past.

I’ve found a correlation between the number of Installed devices in the MIDI device mangler and closing times.
Delete them all and it closes OK. Put them back and it sucks.