Massive hard drive usage causing major performance issue?

Not really sure what to do next. We’ve been using Webroot for many years now. It’s been pretty much rock solid and without any major issues to date. The entire reason I switched our company to Webroot was the low resource utilization. 

However I’ve noticed of late my system getting really sluggish. Even something as simple as launching the calculator would take 10 seconds or more.

Today it was abnormally bad. Calculator was 30-45 seconds per launch, word took a 2 minutes to come up, snipping tool took over a minute. File explorer was longer than all of them.

Started looking at my task manager and noticed 100% disk usage. Thought maybe some app had messed up or something, but imagine my surprise when I sort processes and find webroot pegging my drive to the max.

I shutdown webroot completely and the system performance returned to normal, better than it’s been in a year. The web extension appears to still be loaded but not sure if it’s doing anything now that the software isn’t running in the system tray. I still can’t disable the extension in Edge even though the service doesn’t appear to be running. I’ve got about 30 tabs open but I’ve always been a tab heavy user and not had issues with webroot for many many years. 

Since I shutdown webroot I retried the same programs, calculator loads instantly, snipping tool instantly, word near instantly, maybe 2 seconds with the splash screen from office. 

I’ve noticed the system sluggishness creeping over the last year or so. Calculator was taking 5 seconds, then closer to 10. Things like that, but once running everything seemed fine so I didn’t think much of it, chalked it up to maybe some bad Win 11 performance. Today made it clear that it wasn’t the system.

Not sure if there’s some logs I can submit for deeper troubleshooting, we have close to 40 endpoint licenses and so far I haven’t had any users complain about performance, but I can’t rule out this happening on other machines I just haven’t personally seen it elsewhere. 

I’m definitely a power user compared to the rest of our installs but again, haven’t had any major issues until this. I can’t definitively say that webroot has been the issue for the past year, but it certainly appears to be the case.

Any ideas on what to do? Running with no antivirus isn’t a great solution.