After running Filemon and Regmon, Sygate 5.5 Pro (smc.exe) constantly accesses the registry and the files seclog.log and cmondll.dll which in turn causes explorer.exe to query smc.exe. cmondll.dll does not exist on my hard drive. Is this normal activity of an idle firewall? It's in excess of 500 queries per second which makes for light hard disk usage and noise. Reinstalling didn't do anything.
Bah I made it sound like Regmon & Filemon did this, they are simply what I used to investigate the disk usage.
Sounds like normal SPF behaviour, afaik it is related to SPF's self protection, i.e. checking if it is still running, and to the logging features, i.e. writing log entries to the HD. Nothing to worry about .
While you may not be using the system, I doubt the firewall is truly ever idle. Especially if connected direct to a modem. Some cable connections can have alot of background traffic that would keep a firewall busy doing it's thing. The disk usage and noise you refer to was a complaint my better half made when we had one system connected to cable briefly. I put an old router in front of the system to quiet things down. Regards, CrazyM
Unplugging the modem from the NIC cuts the activity by 2/3 (the log file), but it still relentlessly queries for cmondll.dll which is followed up by 15 or so explorer.exe queries. I found it unusual since the file doesn't even exist. Some of the registry keys trying to be read don't exist either.
Could cmondll.dll be related to something you have uninstalled but still have remnants pointing to it? Does the dll authentication functionality in Sygate have a list you could check and possibly edit? Regards, CrazyM
There aren't any remnants of anything in the firewall (just reinstalled it) and reinstalling the firewall was the first program I uninstalled. Reseting the dll authentication didn't do anything. Even a google search for cmondll.dll was unproductive.
