ekrn.exe crashing/locking on only one PC

Hello all, first time poster.

I've been using and reccomending Eset NOD32 to many of my small business clients for the past year and have had absolutely no problem with any of them until just yesterday. I have one user in particular that's NOD32v3 continually crashes. the ekrn.exe service pops up a windows crash error at random, internet is slowed or completely halted as a result on this PC.

I'm aware of the false positive error from a virus update in the early hours yesterday, this PC as well as 2 others that I know of were hit by it, however I restored the original files on each of them and the other two have been working without fault.

Windows XP Service Pack 3
Nod32 Antivirus v3 Update 3923

- Uninstalled + Reinstalled v3- no change
- Installed v4 - Completely crashed the computer on startup. ekrn.exe went BERSERK eating up 100% of the resources. Uninstalled that.
- Reinstalled (again) v3, however did not update. Computer was fine. Updated this morning? ekrn.exe went back to its old crashing habits.

In short, something is still wrong with the updates since yesterday and it's causing this one particular computer, which is only used for Internet Explorer, Quark, and Microsoft Office 2003, to behave erratically. the egui.exe does NOT communicate with ekrn.exe, you can't scan, you can't view log files or quarantine via Eset NOD32. You can't even update, after that first update goes through and eset starts behaving eratically that's it. No further updates will be downloaded. Complete program breakdown. No changes have been made to this computer at all all Windows/office updates are installed.

Any advice is appreciated, I'm just flat out of ideas at this point, and as luck would have it the computer in question is the General Manager's at this site. So it's important that it's up and running asap. This is the one PC that this sort of thing cannot afford to happen to.

 

When you tried to uninstall and reinstall, did you clear out the Eset registry keys in HKLM and the Eset directory in %allusersprofile%\Application Data\?

You should also look in the system event logs to see if it is complaining about any hardware acting up.

 

I did go through and clear out the registry on the second reinstall, however I completely forgot about the Eset folder in application data. I uninstalled again, cleared out registry and the Eset in application data folder, and reinstalled v3, updated the defs and everything came out as it should. Thanks for the reminder, I could have been stuck on this for a while.

This thread can be closed

 

How about other security programs that were badly deleted or still installed on your PC?