I hope this is the right place to post this, so I apologize if I chose the wrong forum, but is this normal behavior? I should mention that this only happens after a restart and after coming out of connected standby (only sleep state available on this desktop).
It actually took me a while to track down what the issue was. I had tried refreshing Firefox, running it with all extensions disabled, creating a new empty profile, and finally, doing a complete uninstall (using Revo Uninstaller) and reinstall of Firefox. But even completely fresh, with no extensions, cookies, history, etc. it still took at least 30 seconds to start up the first time. Only then did it occur to me to temporarily disable all the antivirus options and yup, Firefox started up immediately.
In task manager, I can see bdservicehost race to the top as soon as I start FF and stay there, scanning something I guess (?), for half a minute or so.
This did not happen with Bitdefender Free, and I have not enabled the Anti-tracker feature, so that can't be it. But some Plus only setting must be causing this then, and I don't have a clue which it could be. I suppose I could keep restarting a dozen times, turning on an additional anti-virus feature each time until I find the culprit, but I figured I'd ask first in case there is an easy fix.
I have a brand new computer, so I shudder to think how long the wait would have been on my old machine. Is it possible to maybe whitelist Firefox so this doesn't happen? I mean, I don't really want to lose web protection, as it is a very useful feature (but the free version has this too and it never caused any issues). I actually haven't tested whitelisting yet as I figure that would not be the best way to deal with this issue (so I don't know if that's even an option).
Just some additional info: No, I do not use any other anti-virus tool and the only firewall I use is Windows Defender Firewall with the Tinywall front-end (and turning Tinywall off or on makes no difference). Version numbers are Bitdefender Antivirus Plus Build 27.0.30.140 and Firefox 125.0.1 (64-bit).
Any help would be very much appreciated, thank you.
