For the last ~6 weeks, Quicken has been notably slower for me — taking 4-6 seconds to change registers, much slower external updates, etc. I did all the usual things — Validate and Super validate, and "correcting all of the busted splits; archiving transactions; etc. Still, it was painfully slow, even though the file size is pretty manageable (30Mb), and my computer is up to date (W10 Enterprise, 32 Gb RAM, SSD).
Playing around a little, I have excluded Quicken from both of my spyware/antispam/antivirus programs, Windows Defender and Malware Bytes Premium. In Malware Bytes, I added qw.exe and my Program Files (x86) folder to the Allow List. In Defender, I allowed Quicken and Quicken CEF Subprocess to communicate through the Defender Firewall.
With these changes, Q is blazing fast again — changing between registers is instantaneous (again), reports load very quickly (again), but I'm not sure whether the transaction download is actuallly quicker.
So, what sorts of risks am I undertaking by excluding Quicken from my Malware and Defender's protections? I'd really appreciate the community's advice on this.
