Incessant kernel panics since Sunday
My faithful 15" MBP (mid-2012, running 10.15.7) has been having fits since Sunday evening. In the middle of unzipping an archive, I opened another tab in Finder. Spinning beach ball of doom, profanity, crash, reboot. Not the first time this happened but the subsequent repeated crashing & rebooting after logging into my account was unusual. No peripherals were attached at the time.
Monday: Zap PRAM (kernel panic after login); zap SMC (same); boot into Recovery, run Disk Utility, repair ALL THE PARTITIONS, reboot, kernel panic after login.
Tuesday: Try to run Apple Hardware Test, get an EFI error. Search the Community, read Apple updated the firmware to force the online diagnostic which generally does not work on a mid-2012 MBP and Apple will not be fixing it. Boot into Safe Mode, kernel panic after opening two applications consecutively. Reboot into Safe Mode, download & run EtreCheck, save generated log in a non-public folder, shutdown, restart, login, kernel panic. Boot into Recovery, begin reinstalling Catalina.
Wednesday: Make new admin account. Open each login application from the old admin account without a problem. Shutdown, restart, login to new admin account with all login applications starting as they should. Update Catalina. Run Activity Monitor, realize Sophos Home is hanging, uninstall with built-in uninstaller. Shutdown, restart, login to old admin account, kernel panic. Boot into Safe Mode, wait 15 minutes, run Time Machine. Laptop stays running overnight & into Thursday.
Thursday: Backup finished. Fast User Switch to old admin account. Kernel panic. Login to new admin account, copy "Report to Apple", realize Migration Assistant won't let me merge accounts, post query here.
What am I missing? I'm loathe to wipe, clean install Catalina, and migrate my old admin account only to reintroduce the issue(s), but that's the next step.
(Regarding the "loaded kexts" section: I uninstalled Kaspersky years ago and the VirtualBox installed on my laptop is version 7.0.10a.)
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15