For a long while I had an annoying issue in which SEP would run Defwatch quickscans nearly every evening after new definitions were loaded, and I was unable to figure out how to stop this from happening. Eventually, I received advice involving a round-about process of editing the registry that ultimately enabled me to prevent these scans.
However, for some reason sometime a few weeks ago, these scans started automatically running again (unfortunately it took a little while for me to figure out that this was the cause of my computer's intermittently running slowly). I went back into the registry to see if the value I had modified had somehow been altered--and it was: it had been reset to 0 (meaning the Defwatch scan would run automatically).
I have no idea how this happened, but I'm guessing it involved some sort of automatic update my system was sent. Would someone explain why this happened and how I can prevent it from happening again?