Scanning with antivirus locks up iMAC after few thousand scans

Question

After installing Sophos antivirus on my iMAC I have tried several times to run a scan and each time it locks up the machine after scanning a few thousand files. I then have to switch off the machine and reboot. Have tried uninstalling and then doing a reinstallation but the same thing happens. The installation process appears to be trouble free and successful each time. Does anybody have a solution to this problem.

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Agile · Accepted Answer

When you say "locks up," do you mean that it becomes completely unresponsive (no animation in the progress bar, no button response, etc) or do you mean that the progress bar stops moving? If you have large or nested archives, disk images, bootcamp volumes, time machine volumes, etc. in the path, the progress bar will stop "moving" until that item has completed its scan... but the animation will continue in the progress bar. If you are low on memory or disk space and are attempting to scan such large archives, it will take a very long time, as everything needs to be extracted prior to scanning.

Try disabling archive scanning and see if you still have a problem (I believe this is covered in more detail in another thread).