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Anyone seeing problems with MS Security Essentials recently?

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tranglos:
About two weeks ago my Win7 (32-bit) system developed a hugely annoying behavior. When the standard, new "Save as" or "Open" dialog box pops up and closes, the application which opened it freezes for 8-10 seconds, and the open or save operation that the dialog is used for is only completed after the app comes out of the freeze.

Strangely enough, the freeze happens even if the dialog box is canceled, so it seems to be related to the internals of the dialog itself, not to whatever the application does with it.

It doesn't always happen, but often enough to be a big nuisance. Maybe 30-50% of the time, but seemingly at random. Let's say I have 10 tabs opened in Firefox. I go from one tab to another and press Ctrl+S in each to save the HTML document. The freeze will happen for about half of the tabs, but sometimes for all of them. Each time the file gets saved only after Firefox unfreezes.

At first I thought it was a Firefox problem, but no, the freeze occurs in any app that uses the modern Save/Open dialogs in Win7. MS Office apps have their own dialogs, and they're immune. Some old apps stick to the Windows 95-style dialogs, and they're immune too. Only apps that use the latest incarnation of the dialogs get frozen.

I removed everything I have installed recently, removed my machine from the homegroup, tried Autoruns and friends, everything I could think of. I was this close to restoring the system image from a month ago.

Finally I tried disabling the real-time protection in MSSE, and it seems to have helped. I've been running a whole day without a single freeze, so I'm pretty convinced MSSE is responsible, though I can't see how it could be (what in MSSE could freeze the app after the dialog has been CANCELED and no files were accessed at all?).

It seems to have started under two weeks ago, but I can't pinpoint it any better. I did install SP1 more or less at that time, so there's another suspect, although that wouldn't account for why the problem goes away if I disable a part of MSSE, and I think I would have noticed if the freezes started occurring immediately after installing SP1. Has anyone else seen anything similar?  

Stoic Joker:
Hm... Well if you mean has it been acting like a belligerent whiskey drunk redneck that wants to start fights with everyone, then yes. I have noted it behaving rather badly as of late (or rather its last update).

Seems like every time I turn around its got the chip pinned at 50% (its max usage cap) because it got pissed at some process that has been running on the machine for the last 5 freaking years. Start an .exe from a network share and holly crap does it ever go bat shit. I did however discover that you can actually whitelist network/UNC path locations if you type them in manually.

If it don't start behaving soon, its gonna get executed permanently.

tranglos:
If it don't start behaving soon, its gonna get executed permanently.
-Stoic Joker (September 21, 2011, 09:00 PM)
--- End quote ---

Ah, interesting. I'm not actually seeing any CPU spikes, during the freezes or otherwise. But I've burned through most AVs on the market, and they only go from bad to worse. Not much left to try anymore. MSSE used to be a pretty friendly neighbor before this.

IainB:
My version of MSSE is OK.

This was an interesting article in PCMag: The Best Free Antivirus Software
What do you reckon? The Ad-Aware thing looks like it tops both lists (virus and malware).

I am currently using:
    * MS Security Essentials
    * Malwarebytes (licenced version)


I got MWB (free version) after doing some some rapid research, to clear up the hard drive of a friend's laptop one day. I used it to remove scareware/malware that MSSE had not caught (and months after I had installed MSSE for him!).

I bought the licenced version of MWB the same day after realising that if MSSE was not up to the job 100% on his laptop, then I had better cover myself on my laptop - and MWB seemed to be very, very good at what it does.
MWB (licenced) is good for the paranoid. It does real-time scanning - so can catch nasty things (e.g., block any browsing to a site regarded as "dangerous") and can do "flash" scans to check currently operating proggies in memory. Doesn't seem to impose a humungous overhead either - on my HP ENVY (Intel i7, Win7 64-bit).

tomos:

I had similar problems with the save/save-as dialogue in XP a few months back -
Avira anti-virus was the culprit.

Currently running win 7 SP1 (64bit pro) with MSSE without any problems...

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