More Anti-Virus problems! This time its McAfee!

OK, a couple of days ago, I was contemplating shelling out for McAfee as replacement for my household anti-virus standard after my bad experience with Avast!. Good thing I am using it in Office and have the opportunity to discover just how crappy McAfee is when it comes to memory consumption.
The screenshot above shows just how much memory the Mcshield service consumes... a whopping 660MB! And this is when it is idle (note the CPU consumption was only three percent!). This, coupled with a whole lot of Vista bloat, effectively caused my reasonably powerful laptop (Intel Core2 Duo T5600 with 2GB RAM) to slow to a crawl due to all the frequent swapping to virtual memory.

For what its worth, the Mcshield service does not consume that ridiculous amount of memory all the time. What I have observed so far is that it happens after I resume from hibernation or from a long period of inactivity in screen-saver mode. This really hurts productivity and user experience since those are the crucial times when I do want to use my computer immediately and not wait another fifteen minutes (sometimes even half an hour!) for all that virtual memory swapping activity to die down.

Suffice to say, McAfee is now off my list of potential replacement anti-virus products!