XP Service Pack 2 woes

[Peter Savas]

I have recently installed SP2 on my XP Professional Tablet PC and have noticed some very odd behavior in Spyware Guard 2.2. Most notably, the System Tray icon either doesn't appear at all, or it does briefly and then disappears, or worst of all, the icon will not respond to any mouse events.

Also, if I disable the automatic loading of SG (by unchecking the box in the Startup tab of the msconfig.exe application), and then try to load the application myself from the desktop icon, the program is also non-responsive, to the point where moving my mouse cursor to any point on the Windows Taskbar changes the mouse pointer from it's default icon to the busy icon.

The only way I have found to regain the use of the Windows Taskbar, Start menu, etc., is to load the Task Manager, go to the Processes tab, and manually terminate the sgmain.exe process.

I did not have any of these problems with XP SP1.

Has anyone else encountered similar problems? Is it worth installing Spyware Blaster instead? And what is the difference between these two products, anyway? ::)

Any advice would be appreciated.

pete

[Shae]

The main difference in Spyware Guard and Spyware Blaster is that Spyware Blaster, doesn't have to run in the background. It adds kill bits to the Registry to prevent bad sites from using Active X or JavaScript to install spyware/adware. Check out www.javacoolsoftware.com/products.html for more info.

As for the SP2 thing, it could be that somehow SP2 is having conflicts with Spyware Guard. Have you noticed the performance of your PC degrading any since you installed SP2, besides the troubles with SpywareGuard? Just a question. As, there have been reports of SP2 slowing down some computers performance. Hope this helps. :)

[Clint]

There's also a MAJOR issue with SpywareBLASTER in SP2. Here's something I wrote:

As far as not being able to VIEW certain websites (no
crashes involved, just pages not displaying), that
unfortunately was traced to SpywareBlaster; specifically
the checkbox in the IE area for "Prevent the installation of
ActiveX based spyware, dialers, etc.". Checking that box
caused several websites to not display ANY content, and
confusingly SP2 displayed ***WINDOWS information***
about the block and absolutely NOTHING about
SpywareBlaster came up! This is why it took so long to
figure out the cause of the problem. Since the creators of
SpywareBlaster have NO SUPPORT, I doubt this will EVER
get fixed. This circumvents the purpose of "SP2's better
security features" since you have to DISABLE some
protection features of SpywareBlaster!

I'll start a new post on that specific issue. I've started 2
other posts on the issue of Blaster taking MINUTES
to "load", AND Enable OR Disable protection and they've
offered no help on that bug.

[Clint]

{QUOTE-> I have recently installed SP2 on my XP Professional Tablet PC and have noticed some very odd behavior in Spyware Guard 2.2. Most notably, the System Tray icon either doesn't appear at all, or it does briefly and then disappears, or worst of all, the icon will not respond to any mouse events.

Also, if I disable the automatic loading of SG (by unchecking the box in the Startup tab of the msconfig.exe application), and then try to load the application myself from the desktop icon, the program is also non-responsive, to the point where moving my mouse cursor to any point on the Windows Taskbar changes the mouse pointer from it's default icon to the busy icon.

The only way I have found to regain the use of the Windows Taskbar, Start menu, etc., is to load the Task Manager, go to the Processes tab, and manually terminate the sgmain.exe process.

I did not have any of these problems with XP SP1.

Has anyone else encountered similar problems? Is it worth installing Spyware Blaster instead? And what is the difference between these two products, anyway? ::)

Any advice would be appreciated.

pete <-QUOTE}

BTW, strange but I've had no issues with SpywareGUARD on SP2.

[Peter Savas]

{QUOTE-> As for the SP2 thing, it could be that somehow SP2 is having conflicts with Spyware Guard. Have you noticed the performance of your PC degrading any since you installed SP2, besides the troubles with SpywareGuard? Just a question. As, there have been reports of SP2 slowing down some computers performance. Hope this helps. :) <-QUOTE}

Thanks for the reply, Shae. The computer I'm referencing (my Tablet PC) just got a wipe and fresh install of XP to which I applied SP2 before loading all my applications back onto it. I haven't noticed any degradation of performance, naturally.

However, what's interesting is that I applied SP2 on my laptop, and SG runs just fine on that system... <sigh>

pete