Antivirus 4.0: Gave up! (Vista crashes + browser crawl)

I'm dissappointed to report that I had to give up on ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4.0 and roll back to 3.0. I wasted an entire day wrestling with it, and I finally was pinned to the mat and had to give up.

Problem 1: Incomplete install; then couldn't uninstall. After fully uninstalling 3.0, the 4.0 install halted at some point. When I shut it down, the icon was in my system tray, so I guessed it installed afterall. But every time I rebooted, my PC would crash to blue screen of death & core dump just as the last apps were being loaded. So I tried to uninstall 4.0 (manually killing auto-start apps as they started avoided the crash), but ESET NOD32 wasn't in the Windows Install/Uninstall list! I tried to run the .msi file to uninstall, but it kept refusing saying it wasn't installed (even though it apparently was). Tried Safe Mode, & had the same effect, . . . but after repeated tries eventually I managed to uninstall using the program menu item under ESET for uninstalling.

Problem 2: Blue screen crashes, over & over & over again. Okay, after properly reinstalling, I found it would still crash my Vista32 every time. (Blue screen of death with core dumps!) I narrowed down the problem to when Vista Windows Sidebar widgets loaded (2 page columns of them). Purging the sidebar's .ini file avoided the crashes. Further experimentation seem to implicate particular widgets when they were loaded or added, or maybe it was when any widget spilled over to the 2nd page. (The blue screen of death came instantly when adding one that NOD32 4.0 didn't like.) Somehow, though, I was eventually able to get them all added back, a little at a time, suffering crashes along the way until I guess I was just lucky and it seemed stable.

Problem 3: Browser crawl. With the crashing stablized, I then noticed my PC was slowing to a crawl ... maybe just web pages. Pages like google.com and my.yahoo.com, that used to come up in a flash, instead simply hung there for as long as 40 seconds -- somewhat random, though faster when a page was revisited. Didn't seem related to clearing the cache, and even disabling NOD32 (either some individual features or overall) didn't seem to help. The only clue I noticed was that when I tried using Google Chrome instead of MS Internet Explorer, the long pause was accompanied by a status message saying "Resolving host ..." (In MSIE, I only saw ""Waiting for http://[...]".) BTW, Windows Defender was disabled for most of that testing. I even tried rebooting my cablemodem & router & PC (mutiple times). I hunted the web for solutions, but was getting way too frustrated by the sluggishness.

Problem 4: Crashed again. The browser crawl drove me to uninstall everything, but first I gave it one more test: I rebooted, & the sidebar was still set to not auto-load so that wasn't an issue. I opened up my browser & went to google.com. Then I went to another site, I think my.yahoo.com and . . . d### blue screen of death again! Hey! What the ####? I didn't do anything to deserve that! Was my name Kenny? (For those of you who didn't get that, that's a SouthPark TV reference.)

Needless to say, I rebooted again, immediately uninstalled 4.0, rebooted yet again, and installed 3.0 back. Everything is running reliably and smooth as silk again. The nightmare has ended.

To be fair, my PC is not a full clean install of Vista32 Business. In fact, it won't let either .NET framework 3.5 nor Vista SP1 install. It's the original HP laptop image with every available Windows update that could be installed (i.e., until SP1 failed), and a good number of other drivers & common apps. But regardless (and maybe I'm naive about this), ... blue screens of death in Vista should NEVER happen.

Craig in NJ
. . . or maybe I should say "Kenny" :-(

 

Yes, I also noticed the slowness while browsing with EAV.

It also killed some of my downloads, and I uninstalled it. Now, my browsing is as fast as a lightning striking.

I didn't have these problems with beta and rc versions, though.

The sad thing, is that, I have a valid license, I won't be able to use.

I won't go back to v3, as it was even worse than v4 is. I'm speaking for me, of course.

Problems seem to be hauting Eset for a while now.

 

I have problems with V4 too. I found BSOD on 3 company computers from 100. Vista craches trying to open a webpage.

 

We'd need to get a complete or at least kernel memory dumps from the affected systems. An issue like this has not been reported since the very first beta version. The dumps will help us reveal the source of the problem as there could be an interference with other software or drivers that is specific to your hardware/software configuration. When you have the dumps ready, let me know and I'll provide you access to our ftp server.

 

I am giving V4 one more week to see if anything changes.
But after that I am also going to give up on it.
I will either go back to 2.7 or install Norton as my main.
Hence my question asking for comparission between 2.7 and 4.0 heuristics, since I wonder if all the MAJOR overhead created by AH is really worth it.

 

Where does one find the dumps? I'd be glad to email them to you if I knew where to find them, assuming they haven't been overwritten by Vista already. You shd be able to private message me with an email to use (or FTP if necessary).

Craig in NJ

 

I found what was wrong with V4 These 3 computers had no SP1. After installing SP1 BSOD disapeared.

 

Very interesting. Alas, SP1 won't install on my laptop. I've tried many times, despite all the prerequisite patches having been installed. No idea why. For a while I thought it was some HP thing that blocked that. Wiping the disk back to its original image might help, but that would be a 2-3 day effort to rebuild all my software, customizations, & settings, so I'm waiting for SP2 before undertaking that pain to avoid having to do that twice. (BTW, .NET framework 3.5 also won't install, in case you're relying on that for some reason.)

BTW, if SP1 stops the crashes, does it also stop the halting/crawling performance during web browsing? If so, maybe .NET 3.5 is involved somehow?

Craig in NJ

 

Well I have SP3 and the halting crawling performance is still here.

 

I presume you mean XP SP3. My issues were with Vista. Interesting to hear the browser crawl effects XP SP3, too.

 

Yes you presume correctly, it's XP SP3, sorry didn't read the fact that you are having VISTA issues....but indeed it's good to know that the problem is not isolated to one OS...therefore should be easier to fix.

 

I can report I had an identical issue on one machine with a fresh install of ESS V4 after a complete clean of V3 as per ESET KB. My crash during installation was complete. No mouse or keyboard or CTRL + ALT + DEL. Screen Saver hadn't kicked in. Installation stage was removing backup files I think. Machine was left installing overnight so it wasn't an early termination. Had to do a cold reboot.

A reinstall wouldn't complete due to permissions on reg keys and programs, even in safe mode as local administrator. Uninstall from Add/Remove didn't exist. Uninstall from Program Folder wouldn't run as it was claiming it wasn't installed. I tried ignoring about 100 warnings during a reinstall but it eventually gets to a cancel only button and rolls back.

Firewall engine wouldn't start correctly, although Anti Virus appeared to be operational and update claimed there was nothing to update. I eventually deleted the entire program folder manually in Safe mode, then rebooted, then reinstalled, then uninstalled, cleaned completely and then reinstalled and everything is happy now. This was all on XP SP3. This would be a fun adventure for a typical home user like my parents.

 

the problem i found was, when it installs well it seems to work well, faster than v3. what made me give up on it was how do i know it's installed well? vista health report says it's not even installed?, i try not to give up on anything i hate new things, but after trying some alternatives v4 is massive, and after 3 years i found i couldnt trust it.
evertime i re- installed it it behaved slightly differently. mat try it again if they slim it down and test it properly before selling it.