Extremely slow scan on MacBook Pro

Question

I installed Sophos MacHomeAV on our 3 laptops last night and proceeded to have it do its initial scan on all three. The scan took a number of hours on 2 of the laptops and finished. However, after 12 straight hours of scanning, Sophos says it still has 6,507,554 files to scan on my MacBook Pro. It is actively scanning, but at an very slow pace. Also, how is it possible to be scanning 6.5 Million files when Disk Utility says my laptop has only 676,493 files? Note that the pref setting in Sophos for scanning inside archives and compressed files is OFF. All three laptops are running OS 10.6.8. What's going on??? Any suggestions?

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AMCarter3 · Accepted Answer

I had the same experience... at first. Then, I figured out what was happening. After looking more carefully at what was being scanned, I found that Sophos was setup to "Scan Local Drives". That meant it was scanning not only my MacBook Pro hard drive, but was also scanning my two 500 GB backup "clone" hard drives AND my 500GB Time Machine hard drive that were attached to my laptop.  The combination of all those drives amounted to some 6-7 Million files and the never ending scan process.  Once I reconfigured Sophos to only scan my laptop hard drive, the scan took quite awhile but was easily completed overnight (5-8 hours?) and showed a number of files to be scanned that related to the amount of files on my laptop hard drive.  :1005877