The clamwin virus scanner is good except for the enormous time it takes to scan
Where other scanner completes the scanning clamwin takes nearly 5-6 times the time taken by other scanners
This has been single most important drawback I find using this. Is there a way out?

To speed things up, set ClamWin's Filters preferences to Include only the 50 or so most dangerous file extensions that are most likely to harbor malware. You can do a search on Google for "dangerous file extensions" to find them. Be sure to add Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, .rtf, popular compression extensons (.zip, .rar., .tar, .gz), .dll, and .bin to your dangerous extensons. I am using the same file extensions that AVG Free uses.

Set Filters ClamWin preferences to Exclude these file extenstions that ClamWin "chews" on for too long: .cab, .msi. ClamWin comes preconfigured to exclude a few extensions already, including .chm, another "chewey" file type. I think you are pretty safe in doing this--especially if you are also using a real-time malware scanner along with Clamwin (and you should be until ClamWin releases version 1.0).

Schedule your scans for times when you will not be using the computer heavily, and set Advanced preferences for a Normal scan priority instead of Low.

Finally, you can do a weekly scan of your entire drive, and set several daily daily scans of the most important directories, Windows, Documents/Settings, and maybe Programs.

Some might disagree with what I've said, but I think it provides a good balance between protection and scan time.

I hope this helps.

Regards,