iMac late 2015 27" Retina beach-balling after Big Sur upgrade

Okay did everting you suggested:

1. Used Find Any File and found a few lurking left overs of BitFender as you
2. Emptied trash
3. restarted in safe mode
4. restarted
5. ran Etrecheck again - attached.

I'm still checking, but after this last reboot, I have not had a beach-ball incident yet! Fingers crossed. Will continue to stress the system for a while. The only "non-Apple" utility left on the system now is OneDrive.

Hope this is it. And if it is, let me know where to send the case of beers!!

I think I am okay. I re-ran FindAnyFile - this time with correct string you asked me to find : "Bitdefender" and it found loads more which I deleted, restarted in safe mode, and restarted again. Report attached. Even from before, based on your previous contribution, the system had settled down nicely; don't think I am going to re-install Bitdefender unless of course, this comes up again.

Kind of apprehensive not running an AV on ANY computer in today's Internet, and BitDefender came highly recommended and worked fine pre-Big Sur?

But very grateful for all your help and patience. Hopefully you find no more evidence of BitFender in that report other than the historical high CPU and the report description.

That was from the 23rd - I have only removed Bitfender today, so it seems to be picking up "history"? (Diagnostics Information (past 7-30 days))

~ % ls -l /Library/Bitdefender/*

zsh: no matches found: /Library/Bitdefender/*

I have since removed lastpass too. Trying to see if it is now down to freezing on password/username entries, but still the issue persists - maybe a bit less frequent or that is my imagination.

I am not able to find any more files on the system related to Bitdefender.

Even an "ls -l /Library/Bitdefender/* reveals :

zsh: no matches found: /Library/Bitdefender/*

I tried:

% sudo find / -name "AntivirusforMac*.*" -print

and got:

/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter/AntivirusforMac_6514A439-1AB5-518C-B307-9067FF5DB69B.plist (deleted this now)

/System/Volumes/Data/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter/AntivirusforMac_6514A439-1AB5-518C-B307-9067FF5DB69B.plist. (cannot find:  ls -l /System/Volumes/Data/Library/Application\ Support/CrashReporter/Anti*

zsh: no matches found: /System/Volumes/Data/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter/Anti*) - maybe was symbolic link?

Attached screenshot shows there is no Bitdefender in /Library at all. What in the last report is telling you it is still installed or has components still present?

Regarding MacOS safety - hmmm, they also said the Titanic won't sink :). The article here at least tells me I am not totally naked at the moment (I am on the i7, not M1), so will stay this way to make sure the fix is permanent for the new few days.

Also noted that the following files were not in the Library->Extensions folder after the removal:

Delete the following Kernel extensions if you find them at the previously mentioned location:

FileProtect.kext

SelfProtect.kext

TMProtection.kext

Sadly I found this first and followed:

http://www.bitdefender-cn.com/consumer/support/answer/1784/index.html

Then found the non -cn version and tried to clean up as best I could still follow. The initial app deletes are different.....

Unfortunately it is still beach balling after the removal of Bitfender according to these instructions:

http://www.bitdefender-cn.com/consumer/support/answer/1784/index.html

Will do - thanks.