Total Commander freezes with browsing operation

[TLis]

Since some time Total Commander freezes at times on various operations, or at least takes an unusually long time to execute, freezing the UI, if I tried to do something. I have no plugins, so it isn't rather a plugin issue. Recently it happened when I had a partition of my system disk in the left pane and the partition of the Samsung Portable SSD T7 (unlocked by providing a password), connected via the USB in the right pane. When frozen, the UI is dimmed, the mouse is moving, but displaying a busy cursor. It does not happen always after starting Total Commander, but usually when I enter a subfolder on a pane with the external drive. I used to encounter this problem maybe since a year or so. Is there a way to diagnose the problem better?

I am using Windows 11 22H2 on Asus TUF Gaming laptop and Total Commander 10.52.

[ghisler(Author)]

It's probably caused by Windows Defender, some of its scans now take several seconds to complete, probably waiting for cloud response.

You could try using process monitor to find out where it hangs, e.g. specific drives or so:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

[Horst.Epp]

The best way is to set an exclusion for the Total Commander process.