Scan times are suddenly DRASTICALLY longer

[Tetranitrocubane 1]

Previously, I would perform a Full System scan and it would be completed in 4 or so hours. I have four different drives that get scanned in the process, three of which are SSDs, one of which is a traditional spinning HDD. The number of items scanned is roughly 9,100,000.

Currently I have engaged a full system scan and even after 5 h, it is still scanning only the boot drive. Only 2,600,000 items have been scanned in this time.

This represents a drastic reduction in performance and an incredible increase in scan time. I have not altered my settings in the least. The only thing I can think that has changed between these scans is upgrading to 16.2.13.0.

What's going on here? Is this an indication of something nefarious having gotten into my system and chewing up the resources? Or did the update make ESET incredibly slow?

[Marcos 4,841]

If the files on the disk have not changed and the very same files are scanned, it could be that new unpackers or support for new unpacker versions have been added and they are now scanned deeply. You could identify a couple of files that take long to scan and then we can look into it and tell if the scan times are ok and expected.

[Tetranitrocubane 1]

New unpackers do sound like they could be responsible here. 

One particular file, or kind of file, that I notice taking a LONG time are the self-extracting NVIDIA driver executables. Right now an old copy of the drivers I had downloaded, 471.68 For Win10, are taking an exceptionally long time to scan.