Hi, I am following this thread with interest as I have exactly the same problem which started a couple of weeks ago and in my case the problem occurs after every reboot. When it first started, I could not turn exploit protection on as it would go to "starting" and just hang there seemingly forever, now at least I can turn it on from the pop up. On searching the forum for "exploit protection" it appears from the significant number of threads about this that it is an ongoing and common problem. I am surprised that as a paid for application, there appears no easy to follow resolution to this problem. Apart from this increasingly annoying glitch, I am very happy with MB.