Some problems with Spyware Doctor...

[GoneToPlaid]

Well, today wasn't fun:

I tried to upgrade ZoneAlarm Free to ZoneAlarm Pro (paid version). I turned off IntelliGuard in SD and ran the upgrade. Everything seemed to go fine, but upon reboot, virtually everything all but locked up. I tried three reboots and still the same problem. Fortunately I had fully backed up my XP system before trying to upgrade to ZA Pro. After restoring the full backup, I had completely uninstall SD, then installed ZA Pro and rebooted, and then reinstalled SD. Then everything worked fine.

Now for today's second problem:

I use Acronis True Image to back up my PC. Normally I have been creating the backup files on another internal hard drive, and then I copy the backup to a removable hard drive so that I have two identical copies of the backup. Today I created an Acronis protected partition and backed up to that hidden partition with no problems. Yet after rebooting decided to try mounting the Acronis hidden partition. This should mount the partition as a new read-only hard drive letter, and this works fine if I mount any Acronis backup which isn't stored on an Acronis hidden partition. Yet trying to mount an Acronis hidden partition even with SD IntelliGuard disabled completely locks up the system by crashing Explorer into a state where XP can't even restart Explorer and all subprocesses. The result is just a completely blank desktop. This only seems to occur when trying to mount an Acronis hidden and protected partition.

[GoneToPlaid]

On a followup, SD just installed some sort of update which told me that I had to reboot my computer. After rebooting I got this popup:

http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll200/MEM-TEK/pctstry.gif

I clicked "OK" only to have three or four other similar popups pop up with different listed memory addresses. I clicked "OK" on all of those until there were no more popups. I then rebooted and everything seems to be okay at present.

[haapy]

Hey gonetoplaid,

I used to have an internal hd for similar purposes, I found several issues with that config and went to a USB external hd. Some of the things that you may want to do with that drive (and with external USB if you wish).

1. Turn off the recycle bin
2. Turn off the system restore point
3. Turn off indexing service ( I recommend turning this off on all drives as it is a resource hog)

I wound up backing up and then disabling the drive to avoid other system conflicts. If you want redundant backups, I would suggest 2 USB external hard drives. It keeps things a bit simpler and safer.

The other consideration is that the internal HD is always on, and unless you disable it, it is subject to any malware you may get.

[GoneToPlaid]

Hey gonetoplaid,

I used to have an internal hd for similar purposes, I found several issues with that config and went to a USB external hd. Some of the things that you may want to do with that drive (and with external USB if you wish).

1. Turn off the recycle bin
2. Turn off the system restore point
3. Turn off indexing service ( I recommend turning this off on all drives as it is a resource hog)

I wound up backing up and then disabling the drive to avoid other system conflicts. If you want redundant backups, I would suggest 2 USB external hard drives. It keeps things a bit simpler and safer.

The other consideration is that the internal HD is always on, and unless you disable it, it is subject to any malware you may get.

Hi haapy,

The other internal HD is in a removable drive caddy, allowing me to power off the computer and then remove it.

I currently have system restore set to only monitor my C: drive.

Hmm...Recently I did download and install Microsoft's new indexing service update for XP from Windows Update. I think that I am going to completely disable indexing service since it occurs to me that it could have immediately tried to start indexing the mounted Acronis partition which mounts as a read-only drive. Do you know if MS indexing service saves the index data on the C: drive, or does it save these data files on each drive?

[haapy]

Your internal config is higher tech than mine was!

Each of the drives can be configured independently for recycle bin, system restore and indexing. If your Acronis is read only, any one of those 3 could cause you problems as the system will attempt to write to it. I would disable all 3 on that acronis partition.

BTW that new Microsoft search thing has proven problematic and I did not see any improvement over regular serch with indexing turned off. I uninstalled it.

Because indexing can be set for each drive independently, I would guess that the index data is on the respective drive, but I am not sure.

I am glad you got SD/ZA resolved. Competition for resources. Did you turn on kernal compatibility mode in SD?

[GoneToPlaid]

...BTW that new Microsoft search thing has proven problematic and I did not see any improvement over regular serch with indexing turned off. I uninstalled it.

Because indexing can be set for each drive independently, I would guess that the index data is on the respective drive, but I am not sure.

I am glad you got SD/ZA resolved. Competition for resources. Did you turn on kernal compatibility mode in SD?

Thanks for the heads up about the new MS search tool. I am dumping it.

Re ZoneAlarm, SD was already set for kernel compatibility mode. I guess SD doesn't like it if ZA or perhaps any other firewall is installed after SD is installed. Anyway, the simple solution was to uninstall SD, do my ZA upgrade, and then reinstall SD. That seemed to work just fine without any problems.

:)

[AChen]

Hi Guys,

We checked this out further and this appears to be a bug with Acronis True Image. Its virtual disk driver opens files when it is mounting an image file from a hidden partition and our mini-filter driver tries to get that new volume's drive letter and causes deadlock in Mount Manager of Windows XP. This is a known issue of XP and is fixed in Vista by MS.

There are 2 possible solutions to get rid of this problem:
1. Mount the image in read-write mode. It can be enabled on the second page of mounting wizard. The default mode is read-only. In this read-write mode Acronis driver does not open files for unknown reason and this problem can be bypassed.
2. Upgrade XP to Vista or later version.