Hmm... I feel myself sitting in the category "Do'h" as it seems to be solved by the click of a mouse already.
I did the following.
From start menu, I opened Control Panel, then selected Windows Defender on there.
Under the Tools menu, options I removed the checkbox at "Scan zip files" and in my quick testing it appears the lockups are mostly gone.
See also the screen shot of the settings attached.
Of course it should not do that on a shared folder and I'm not sure it is fixable by vmware other then making the shared folders a lot faster.
You can probably also mitigate the effect by adding more CPU cores to the VM, but it would still run one core to its limits.
For me this workaround is fine as my normal antivirus solution is the one who should do the zip scanning, for sure not windows defender.
Microsoft didn't really help much by confusing what the application really does (up to Windows 7 only malware scanning, from Windows 8 onwards also antivirus)
I'm happy disabling this windows defender option, knowing my VM is so much more usable now.
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Wil