Avira rendering PC completely unusable by hogging hard disk - was there a new update that is borked?

This morning, my PC was rendered practically unusable as a result of what looks like Avira running a scan (files accessed by the system process included various Avira-related files, the files beind read constantly changed, and there was also an endpointprotection.exe (I think?) process that also leads back to Avira). Opening up resource manager in Windows shows 100% disk usage, mainly due to writing to the page file.

With Avira hogging the page file and disk bandwidth, it was practically impossible to use any other applications as they were completely non-responsive. Even just starting task manager, resource manager and services.msc took ~10 minutes each. Once they started, it was impossible to terminate the services or processes or stop the scan, and trying to start the Avira interface itself was a complete non-starter due to the non-responsive system. I ended up having to restart the PC to regain control.

Upon restarting, I removed Avira completely and the problem with the sluggish system is now solved. I would be happy to reinstall Avira if these problems are addressed, but right now, it's behaving like malware itself. Anything more than a few seconds is way too long to take complete control of the PC and render it inoperable. Yet the scan had not even finished after an hour of this behaviour. I have not had this problem previously; yes, there have been times when the PC is a little laggy when there is a scan happening, but other applications have still been usable and the scan normally ends relatively quickly. And there were several GB of free RAM prior to the scan starting. That suggests that the process ate up all free RAM and then proceeded to devour the page file.

There seems to be no good reason why the memory footprint for a scan should be so large that the entire hard disk's bandwidth is saturated by writing to the page file. This makes me think that there is probably a bug/memory leak. Beyond that, I'd expect far more cautious use of system resources anyway, as rendering a system completely inoperable by hogging all resources is surely not the desired behaviour for a background process.

I don't know if there is a new version that was released within the last 24/48 hours - there's no release dates in the version history, just version numbers - but if so, it looks like the latest release has big issues. I'm using Windows 7 Home Premium, which I know is a legacy system, but I've never had problems with Avira like this before and have no intention of upgrading the OS on this PC (I'll bite that bullet when I get a new PC).