Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0.657.0 Final

I'm average. I do like MSE's Zen-like simplicity. There's a lot to be said for being simple. I have tried Bullguard, Norton & McAfee in the past. There's way less to go wrong with simple IMHO.

Well, I'm average but not 50+ & it is way perfect for me. It does work very well on Win 7 64 bit. However, the system tray icon hangs red at start-up sometimes. It is fairly rare though. I have read other people have had the same problem, I take it is a known bug. It works well on Vista as well.

I have a lot of faith in it. Avast! free would almost certainly have been my second choice if MSE had proved to be troublesome.

That's interesting. I wonder why it slows XP?

 

"It does work very well on Win 7 64 bit. However, the system tray icon hangs red at start-up sometimes. It is fairly rare though. I have read other people have had the same problem, I take it is a known bug. It works well on Vista as well."

Any easy fixes?

 

After the new engine update a week or so ago i have not seen the problem in Vista so far.

 

JRViejo's fix looks interesting. To be totally honest, it is rare for it to happen either on my Vista 32 bit laptop or Seven 64 bit desktop. I am sure MS are working to fix this as it is a known bug. It could be a fix in the last updates for all I know.

 

My email notifications are all screwed up with Wilders so I don't know if I've posted this info or not in this topic. My red icon issue was fixed by setting Win 7 Security Center to Automatic intsead of Automatic (Delayed start).

 

Thanks JRViejo, no icon was my issue also.

 

I'm not sure if my solution would be effective or not, since I never experienced that problem (that I was aware of, anyway), but MSE adds the following autorun entry:

Code:

"c:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\msseces.exe" -hide -runkey

And, it's added for Local Machine (every user).

Has anyone tried the following approach: Create a scheduled task to run MSE with option -hide -runkey and start this task under user name SYSTEM?

You could try that and see if it solves it.

 

You know i just noticed that my icon for mse was not there on my 64bit Windows 7 Pro. I tried the suggestion about putting it in startup but what happens when it boots up is MSE loads in your face with the full program opening. So i deleted the shortcut.

I only want it to load in startup without having to reboot the machine. This happens to me on and off.

I also notice it turns red then when everything else loads it turns green when it does load in startup.

BTW when it doesn't load it is still working in the backround because i did a eicar test and it popped up screaming that i had a virus so at least I do know it is working but when it is doing a scan I will not know since the icon is not there.

What does the registry key do? does it make it load in startup? only or does it do the same thing as the other fix?
I do not want it to popup in my face on boot up, i just want it to sit pretty in the taskbar like the other icons that are there.

This doesn't happen on any of my other computers running in 32bit.
robin

 

JRViejo,
Great. Thanks for the help.
Hugger

 

This was a major annoyance for me with MSE, but even applying this setting did not resolve things. Initially I thought this had something to do with the fact that I have an oldish machine with 5400 RPM drive, but I observed the same thing with 7200RPM and SSD drives too. So it looks like it's a problem with MSE. Totally unrelated but avast! and Norton AV never have issues starting up fully-functional.

 

Presently, I do not have MSE on board. The code is just the path to where MSE is on your hard drive. Partition letter would have to match your install of course. Actually this is not a reg tweak. The info is already in the registry at the startup/run location, be it Local Machine or Current User. Since I don't have MSE installed, I don't know for sure which location it writes the startup values too. It's going to either be at

Code:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

or

Code:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

The -hide is what will hide the UI on startup

 

It creates the Local_Machine entry.

As I previously mentioned, those having problems with MSE, and do not wish to follow JRViejo approach, could try what I mentioned:

Using user name SYSTEM, will make the task start to every account.

Make sure the task is started before session start. Not sure if it makes any difference, though.

 

I agree here. This would be the more preferred way of doing it for those who are familiar with Task Scheduler

 

OK. thanks for the info.

 

interesting, MSE is set to Automatic- not delayed automatic and today when i started the machine- there it was in the taskbar.
As said with me it is on and off
If microsost doesn't fix this in next upgrade I will just either reboot or use the method of shuffing it in my face on startup
Just for this small annoyance i will not uninstall it because it still works fine otherwise, unless someone has another solution
but thanks for the ideas
robin

 

Maybe we are talking the same thing here but I was thinking that the Security Center is a separate service than MSE. Security Center is the service I was referring to about being set to Automatic. At the time, mine was set to Automatic (Delayed start). Switching it to Automatic cleared up my MSE tray icon issues. It's been a while since I've had MSE on board.

 

OK, it seems to be behaving itself on both of my machines at the moment. I wonder whether it is some systems tray bug. On my Vista laptop I have had odd things happen in the tray on start up. It is comparatively rare, but I have had icons missing, sometimes I would get two McAfee icons appear! (Double scary! LOL )

My Win7 (64 bit) desktop seems to be free of these problems. Anyway, a reboot will solve the 'red' icon hanging for MSE. I'm pretty sure MS are trying to solve this. Well, I hope they are!

 

I get this tray icon issue with Win 7 frequently. Just today as a matter of fact was the latest. I was missing three tray icons. A look in Task Manager shows that they are all running but the tray icons are Awol. I can select customize icons for the tray and those icons for that boot period will be missing. It will just have the text label listed as what the app is. It bugs me to no end so I usually kill the app and start it again.

 

It seems much rarer on my Win 7 computer, if it happens on either computer I just reboot & it normally fixes itself. From what I can remember this bug used to happen to XP as well. I have a strange feeling that this is the root of the problems people are experiencing with the MSE tray icon. I don't think I have ever known anybody who has never experienced this 'tray icon disappearing behaviour'. For all we know MS have been trying to fix this for years!

 

Exactly. Like the infamous partial hidden taskbar/tray tooltips. It took them until XPSP3 to fix it. This is the one where for no particular reason, tooltips would be partially hidden under the taskbar when hovering over taskbar or tray icons.