"extras" not loading (Package Manager, Tutorials, Documentation, etc)

A. Traeger's icon

Has anyone run into this issue before? All of my "extras" like file browser, documentation, tutorials, etc do not load and just sit as shown in the picture below, churning away but never loading. Going to "open package manager" hangs with a white screen and "loading" in the title bar.
(see attached image)

All of my patches & the object help files seem to work fine though. Everything was working previously but suddenly stopped a couple of weeks ago.

I also found this forum post:
https://cycling74.com/forums/package-manager-load-indefinitly This is same issue I have with package manager.

Max 7.3.4 on Windows 7 Pro.

I uninstalled / reinstalled the previous version and everything was working again initially. Then an hour or so later I noticed that nothing was working again.

I have an email in to support about this. Any idea what would cause this to happen?

A. Traeger's icon

I seem to have found the problem so I'll post it here in case others encounter the issue.

It seems my anti-virus software is causing an issue. I disabled the anti-virus and things immediately started working again.

A user on the Facebook group thought it could be a firewall issue too. So if anyone encounters this issue, try looking at either of those 2 things.