I just had a revelation! Some of my scenery installs were stalling and looking at the Task Manager I noticed the process was suspended. I did a bit of research and found this could be due to some AV or firewall protection so I disabled everything in BitDefender, without success. Then I remembered Acronis was installed although I don't use it, and I checked that. Active Protection, a ransomware protection feature, was turned on. I turned it off and... wow!

Not only are my installations completing, I think they are faster (but that could be a bit subjective). What is very real is that the sim itself (v5) now loads five to ten times faster! There isn't a huge difference from start to the Scenario screen, but from there to playable, what a difference! I used to hang at 5% sometimes for minutes, and then slow down again considerably around 60 to 80%, depending on the location. I now have a full load under 45 seconds regardless of where I am! I am ecstatic. Give this a try if you have Active Protection on!

TURN IT OFF!
You can get Problems with so much installers, that not work with this security from Acronis.
Acronis is good for Backup, for security it is very bad!

 

I turned it off within hours of installing for the same reason. 

I turned it off, but the service is still running if I open the task manager, even after several restarts. How I hate such stupid softwares...

Chris-

You should be able to stop that service under Win + R > services.msc

I use Acronis for backup but I disabled all their services. When I need to backup,Acronis will ask to enable the services it needs - when it's done, I just disable them again. Not really time consuming.

 

Vic

Good thinking you all, I just checked and indeed found services still running. All set to manual now!