Scheduled Scan Refuses to Cancel

This is an annoying and niggling little quirk in what is on the whole an excellent product.

If I am performing another task and WSA starts performing a scheduled scan, or decides to perform a scan at a non-scheduled time for reasons best known to WSA, it is in practice impossible for me to cancel that scan. It will stubbornly restart a few seconds after my having cancelled it, and continue doing this again and again and again until I the user capitulate in utter frustration and just let it continue and finish.

There is only one workaround I can find for this: go into Settings and uncheck "Enable Scheduled Scans". But not only is this a hassle but, more important, the danger is that after finishing whatever task I am doing, I will then forget to go back into Settings and check this box again.

What on earth is the point of having the option of cancelling a scheduled task if WSA then stubbornly refuses to respect the user's wish?? Sorry to moan, but this is really bugging me...

 

Could you please send a scan log to report@prevxresearch.com with Joe in the subject so that I can take a look at what's triggering the subsequent scan?

Thanks!

 

Hi Joe.

I have just sent a scan log with a couple of explanatory comments, to report@prevxresearch.com with subject "FAO Joe", as you requested.

Thank you in advance for going to the trouble of looking at this

 

Thanks - I've found a few possibilities here and will hopefully have them fixed in the next build.

Let me know if anything returns after the next update!

 

Thanks!

I've had a closer look myself at the scan log I sent you, and I think I have now cottoned on to what the problem is. I have a special programme Archive Assist which addresses an annoying bug in Outlook 2003, ie. that the Modified Date of some Outlook 2003 messages annoyingly keep getting updated to today's date (possibly when they are being browsed by the user?).

This means that the Auto-Archive utility in Outlook won’t work properly. The problem being that the Auto-Archive utility in Outlook uses the Modified Date of messages to determine whether those messages are old enough to be archived. So the messages whose Modified Date has been changed to a more recent date won’t get archived.

Archive Assist addresses this problem by executing a simple manual operation in which the programme takes over the computer clock to change the Messages' Modified Date to their Sent or Received Date (either two options can be selected by the user). Subsequently, Auto-Archive will operate correctly.

But this means that the computer clock effectively goes haywire each time I manually execute this operation. The result being that WSA generates multiple scan commands due to the time and date on the computer clock moving all over the place (If you go to the entry "Sat 11-02-2012 14:08:37.0700" in the log file, Joe, and see what happens after that, you will understand exactly what I'm talking about —though, to be honest, I imagine you’ve got much better things to do than trawling through my log file again ).

I had already realised the necessity to disable Windows Task Scheduler while doing this Outlook utility task but had completely forgotten that WSA also has its own inbuilt Scan Scheduler. So whenever I do an Auto Archive of my Outlook messages, I must remember to temporarily either disable WSA Scan Scheduler or simply close down WSA. This will resolve the problem, I think.

Sorry to have troubled you . I think the problem was as simple as that.

 

Wow, that's quite an abnormal solution for the application to have. That would indeed cause problems with WSA and probably most other applications, and I don't think there would be an easy solution for it, short of just disabling scheduled scans entirely as the internal clocks will be changing very frequently.

 

Which is basically what I do (for Windows). As for WSA, I found yesterday that I have to completely close WSA during operation. The clock changes so upset WSA that I think it suspects malware as being present and so automatically initiates a scan even when scheduled scans are disabled. Not surprising really! Prevx didn't seem to mind, but WSA definitely does!

Nevertheless I have to say this little utility programme does an extremely effective job (even if somewhat unconventional in its approach ) of dealing with a bug in Outlook: Modified Dates being changed to more recent dates on some messages, so making AutoArchive not function correctly, resulting in inconsistent archiving and potentially an increasingly bloated Outlook.pst file (unless you go through the tedious task of archiving manually).

As you can imagine, this application was being flagged as malware until I reported it about a year and a half ago as an FP to Prevx, and then I had to do the same again with Webroot.