Phantom E-mail Files

This is not a serious problem -- or, at least, I don't think it is. But it is bugging the living devil out of me! I will be very grateful if someone can tell me how to eliminate this phenomenon.

My wife and I use NOD32 on our desktop and notebook computers. The NOD32 installation on her notebook insists on showing two phantom Outlook PST files in the Target window of the On Demand scanner. Those files don't exist on her system any more, though they did exist and were scanned there at one time. Yet NOD32 won't let me delete them from that display.

Okay, so I figured a little scorched earth policy would work. I uninstalled NOD32, deleted the ESET directory under Program Files, and removed every instance of both file names and of NOD32 from the registry. (I didn't go that far the first time. I just got around to going this far on the third try.)

I rebooted the system after uninstalling NOD32, then rebooted it again after deleting the ESET folder and making the registry changes. Then I reinstalled NOD32. Guess what. The two pesky phantom files are there in the Target window -- except this time one of them doesn't have a name.

The e-mail files are duplicated back-and-forth between the desktop and the notebook computer to be certain that all data on both systems is current. The two phantom files are nowhere to be seen in the Target window of the desktop's instance of NOD32.

Is there some way for me to get rid of this issue on the notebook? I am used to having pretty solid control over what is, and is not, on our systems -- and how it is all configured. This is REALLY annoying me!

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Ross

 

Go into the Windows control panel, double click on the mail icon and see what you have in there.

You obviously had Outlook set up at some point as your email client and windows still thinks that you do.

 

Thank you for replying.

I think I see what you're getting at, but that's not really the issue. Outlook is, indeed, the default e-mail client on all of these systems. The problem is that these "target" files don't even exist. They did at one time, but they are gone. But NOD32 insists that they are still there, and it will not let me delete the reference to them from that window.

Ross

 

I did a little test, the filenames are stored in the profile.
In my test it was saved in Control Center Profile, stored in registerkey;
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Eset\Nod\CurrentVersion\Modules\NOD32\Settings\Config004\Settings

(Config004 is Control Center Profile on my pc, could be different on another pc)

Maybe this information helps u finding a solution...?

 

Yes, ctrlaltdelete, that was the location from which I deleted the target file names in my earlier testing. Funny thing was that, every time I restarted NOD32 those phantom target file entries reappeared in the registry!

But your post, and the post from pc-support got me to thinking -- a rare occasion this late in the evening. It was obvious that the problem had something to do with Outlook, more than something to do with NOD32. I mean that, after all, NOD32 had to be picking this information about the phantom files up from somewhere. I had pretty well accounted for the fact that NOD32 wasn't storing the information anywhere that I hadn't deleted between installations. It had to be getting the information from Outlook or from the registry. If it was in the registry the data on those names certainly wasn't being stored in plain text.

Although these phantom data files were not visible in the data file manager of Outlook on that notebook computer I found that I was able to click on a blank area below the "Personal Folers.pst" file in the data file manager -- just as though a filename were there. I selected the two blank spots and closed them. After that the phantoms disappeared from the NOD32 scanning target window. W-E-I-R-D!

I think I've figured it out. As I mentioned earlier my wife copies files back and forth between her desktop and notebook systems. She uses a folder / file comparison ustility named Beyond Compare to do this. My guess is that she "removed" those files from the data manager on her desktop system, and then deleted the physical files -- or archived them. But, when she equilibrated the filesets between her two computers the next time she forgot to use the Outlook data file manager on the notebook to "remove" those two files from Outlook's list of data files beforehand. So, the next time Outlook was started on the notebook computer it couldn't find those two files. Although the files were obviously gone I guess Outlook continued to hold the information on their names/locations somewhere in its settings. And that must be where NOD32 was getting the information from. Once I found a way to tell Outlook to forget about those files, NOD32 was happy to let them go, too.

I will confirm this tomorrow with wifey. (She's asleep, and, if I'm lucky, I will be asleep, too, in a little while. It's late for the old boy, but I had to figure this out before I would have been able to sleep.)

I will post corrections to this story, if there are any, tomorrow after asking the spouse about it.

Thank you folks for helping me. You confirmed that my thinking was going, albeit slowly, in the right direction. By making me think a little more carefully you got me to the answer. I just knew that this couldn't be some obnoxious behavior on NOD32's part. It has been a really nice piece of software to use over the last few years.

Ross

 

NOD32 most likely gets this information from MS Outlook via MAPI. A workaround would be to disable MAPI in the on-demand scanner setup.

 

Thank you for that info, Marcos. When I have a bit of time this weekend I may test by deliberately creating the problem and then turning off the MAPI interface to see if it fixes the issue. However, I guess I'd still rather have the interface on and really fix the problem in Outlook.

I did confirm with my wife, BTW, that the sequence of events with these files was just as I had imagined. I think I further complicated matters by fiddling around in the registry the way I did. I didn't even think to look in the Outlook data file management dialog before I deleted those entries and messed around with the NOD32 environment.

Anyway, all's well that ends well. I'm just glad to have that particular little monkey off of my back. Funny how weird (and probably inconsequential) things like that can bother me. Probably not good for the mental health.



Ross