Czkawka brings system to its knees, even after stopped?

[zornqui]

The longer czkawka runs a search for "similar videos," the more my system performance denigrates. After a few hours, it becomes nearly unusable, and takes a long time just to stop czkawka, and even once stopped, the system remains almost unusable, requiring a reboot. I see that WMI Provider and system interrupts spike wildly as this occurs, those being the apparent proximate causes of the performance degradation, and most oddly and notably nothing changes after czkawka is shut down, it seems (I haven't waited more than 20 minutes) that the system must be rebooted, it will not, at least not in any short term, return to expected operation.

It's comparing "only" 20,367 files that amount to 5.93 TB, virtually all videos and a relatively small portion of images. No other file comparison program has created such a problem.

My system is decent, the mobo is ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING, CPU is AMD Ryzen 7 5800x. Reasonable amounts of free hard drive. No other apparent issues.

Any ideas??? Thank you!