Weird behavior after win 8.1 upgrade

Hey,

I've been having some issues since I upgraded to Win8.1 yesterday. I ran the compatibility tool prior to the upgrade, which said WSA was incompatible. Support said internal testing said it was fine and that the tool was wrong. I proceeded with the upgrade, and was met with a tremendous amount of system instability.

The machine would regularly completely hard lock after getting to the desktop, when it didn't lock up there, it would lock up when entering text in fields within browsers or even in the windows run dialog (win + r).

I started disabling stuff on startup one item at a time, thinking maybe some application was causing issues. After disabling, WSA, I no longer had freezes or any other weird behavior. I ran a full scan with it and saved the scan log, and saw quite a few Windows dlls and drivers being flagged with values.

I figured I'd uninstall the product and reinstall to see if that eliminated the issue. The regular windows uninstall method (cp > programs and features > uninstall) actually failed to remove WSA. I ended up using an elevated cmd prompt and executed wrsa.exe -uninstall which actually did remove the product.

When I attempted to reinstall it, and it entered its initial "optimization" screen where it does the first full scan and settings adjustment and stuff, the scan process halted at 6% on kernel32.dll and didn't proceed even after leaving it for 20 minutes or so. I canceled the scan (which actually took about 5 minutes before it actually succeeded) and attempted to remove WSA again, which failed. I again used WRSA.exe -uninstall to remove it, and rebooted. Since removing it, the system's been behaving okay.

I opened a ticket about it and included an excerpt from my scan log, indicating the files that WSA was flagging as unknown/untrusted/whatever - -http://pastebin.com/F4M51jZ9 - there's a bunch of MS message queue, creative labs drivers, intel drivers, and other microsoft dlls being flagged as untrusted.

I figured I'd mention it here in case anyone else noticed similar behavior.

This particular machine:
AMD 8350
Win8.1 x64 Build 9200
16GB RAM
120GB SSD
WSA 8.0.14.7

 

+1

 

IMMEDIATE NEWS FLASH!

MICROSOFT PULLS 8.1 UPDATE!

http://betanews.com/2013/10/19/microsoft-pulls-windows-rt-8-1-update-from-windows-store/

 

Thats a different windows.

 

That is an excessive number of unknowns - our support team should be taking a look at this and will have it corrected shortly.

 

i submitted logs (via wsalog) last night, hopefully that'll shed some light on what's going on. wasn't able to reinstall wsa yet (still hangs on kernel32.dll) so the log app was run without the product actually installed or running.

 

That is the Windows RT update.

 

My personal experience (your mileage will vary)

1) Tried to install Win 8.1 on 2 Win 8 laptops. Both installations failed with error 0X80070057.

2) Read thread about Win 8.1 installation conflict with Webroot.

3) Disabled Webroot and tried intallations again, upgrade completed successfully on both laptops.

4) After installation,Webroot started giving multiple suspicious behavior notices on both laptops for normal Windows processes, even a Windows Update for Win 8.1. This never happened in Win 8.

5)Windows applications like Windows Explorer, Control Panel and Internet Explorer were very slow to start and move around.

6) Uninstalled Webroot and activated Windows Defender. Now everything runs fast with no HIPS messages.

7) Will wait for a Webroot update before reinstalling WSE!

 

I'm reaching out to our support team and will let you know what I find out.

 

This is what I suggested for one's having issues with WSA and Win 8.1. https://community.webroot.com/t5/Webroot-SecureAnywhere-Internet/Windows-8-1-upgrade/m-p/62825#M1898

HTH,

TH

 

unfortunately, in my case, wsa actually finish its initial scan and will freeze any open application and won't allow anything else to execute (presumably til it's done)

still waiting for a reply from support about the logs i submitted.

 

Not having much luck here. Sent logs again today. Guess we'll see how this goes.

Installed again so I could run wsalogs, product got stuck scanning at 6% yet again (file changes each time, so I don't think it's a failure with a specific file) - left it for 6 hours, same issue. 0% cpu utilization, 0 disk activity..just stuck.

UI responds to clicks. If I attempt to abort the scan, it confirms it and never stops. If I reboot, it starts in a failed state, and the machine is so bogged down it's unusable and requires an elevated cmd prompt to remove via -uninstall flag.

-http://i.imgur.com/CZNgmJ3.png screenshot of the failure mode.

 

Well, I have to arrange a phone call tomorrow or Tuesday which will be tons of fun because I'm on the road and the machine is at home, but I'll figure something out. I will say though that this is wearing me out. It's annoying that the only issue I've had with the Windows client has been this much of a pain to fix.

I found an additional quirk - I accidentally clicked "no" on the UAC prompt when reinstalling and found that WSA was able to scan successfully and it didn't freeze. In that state, it won't start with windows, doesn't show up in programs & features and won't actually run unless I execute the installer again and elevate via UAC when prompted (the first two parts of that are expected, seeing how I didn't give the installer permission to use administrative privs)

 

You can blame Microsoft as many programs are not working as they should just Google your Topic and this one! Problems after win 8.1 upgrade

TH

 

well, no. the compatibility tool did flag WSA as incompatible. WSA support says it was tested internally and fine, but regardless, there are some lingering issues. i understand that not every configuration or combination of factors can be tested, however, this is literally the /only/ software i have that was flagged as incompatible, and it's also the only thing that's not working in win 8.1. MS provided plenty of time for testing and plenty of guidance for companies to ensure stuff worked with win 8.1.

 

It works perfectly fine on my 2 VM's but as being an MVP I downloaded the RTM ISO from MSDN and it installed fine with WSA running and it was the 2013 version of WSA but through the Windows store that's a different story IMO. Also through the MVP channels that's all there talking about one thing is broken on this an this on that.

Sorry,

TH

 

that's not unique to this particular update. people complain about stuff being broken after every SP or maj release. luckily for me, i rarely have to do any system management anymore (network engineer), so i can save my sanity at work.

as far as using the 2013 product, maybe that's part of the issue. i really don't know. i was updated to 2014 right before the upgrade to 8.1. support hasn't so much as given me a clue of what they think might be going on, so i'm pretty well in the dark.

 

Could you PM me your email address so that I can take a look and get you some feedback?

Thanks!