MCaffee Antivirus causes slow down

We have the antivirus agent installed on all the machines and it inevitably causes slow down on them. It is not a real problem however apart from on those running C compilers such as Watcom. During compiling Mcaffee cuts in every time the file is accessed – compile times there become stupidly long. Disabling the Virus Checker or not virus checking that directory is not an acceptable solution. If there is nothing else that can be done, is there a better virus checker out there?