Turns out my laptop crashing problem isn’t due to the virus scanner per se, but rather to some combination of the virus scanner and a driver in my system called sbfshook.sys. The most curious thing about “sbfshook” is that I can find absolutely no information about it. The file isn’t tagged with any author or version information, nor can I find a single reference to it on Google. Virus scanners don’t flag it as a virus either (anyway if it were a known virus then I figure there would be a reference to it somewhere on the Web). I don’t know where it came from, nor when it was installed. A total mystery.

Anyway, disabling the driver seems to have cured the crashing problem without any ill effect to the system… I hope.