I've been having a problem with CPU and memory usage on my Mac and in addition to Spotlight, Bitdefender seems to be a major culprit of that. I added some exclusions, but then after a restart the BD console won't start. I get no menu bar icon and can't start it from the applications list either. I have the BD Agent there and if I start it it seems to go down a black hole.
Following instructions from another article I completely removed BD and rebooted (via a Disk Utility First Aid run in Safe Mode). After another reboot I reinstalled from scratch from the BD Central. The BD console was happily running and I allowed the BD Daemon to run in the security and privacy settings as required and then rebooted as suggested. Now I'm back to square one. No BD icon and can't start the console.