Real-Time Protection Always Being Turned Off

[pvs]

Hmmm, yes, I've thought of that.  It would also be a good way to check if Microsoft is still offering Windows Updates for XP.  They USED TO bug me once in a while when I cloned a system HDD, but they haven'y peeped in many many months.  Maybe they've figured out that I'm not running more than this one machine, just with a multitude of different HDDs.  But I wonder what would happen if I tried a complete reinstall of the same Serial number.  I would also need to work with many of the software producers, ensuring that I de-activate each product before trying to reinstall.

So, outside of the ENORMOUS amount of work such a re-install would entail, I am concerned that doing so might upset the apple cart, so to speak, and leave me with products I can no longer use.  

Still, I am holding the idea out as a last-ditch approach, and will see what I can do to patch this old installation together before taking on that approach.

FWIW, prior to making my next backup, I have PXE-booted a Kaspersky Rescue Disk, and have run a scan on both the WinXP and the Win7 partitions, as well as the Boot Sector and Hidden Startup objects.  Low and behold, the scan DID turn up ONE nasty bugger. But it was found in an uninstaller for Nikon Capture NX2 ON THE Win7 side.  Obviously, I have never used that uninstaller (or else, the program would be gone), but please advise - could the presence of that virus in that file affect either of the partitions, even though I never use it? I am not very educated in the way these things can work.  The virus was: Trojan.MSIL.Agent.abxqs. Please advise.  At any rate, I allowed Kaspersky to delete the entire file, and disinfection was not possible.

Trying to be as careful as possible here, I am now also allowing Kaspersky to scan my entire E drive.  It's 44% done as I write this, and so far, it appears clean.  But there's still a long way to go, obviously.

And yes, I DO enjoy this stuff.  It used to be part of my job, and I always thought it was so great being able to do my hobby for a living.  Kinda wish I could find some way to earn some dollars doing it again.  But if not, well at least I have a fantastic system here at home to fiddle around with. 

Anyway, let me get back to this thing.  I'd like to be able to start up the Backup process before I turn in.

"See" you in a day or two,

-pvs

[AdvancedSetup]

42 minutes ago, pvs said:

So, outside of the ENORMOUS amount of work such a re-install would entail, I am concerned that doing so might upset the apple cart, so to speak, and leave me with products I can no longer use.  

 

 

How could you upset the apple cart?

IF you don't like how it is or where it's going then simply swap the hard drive back to one of the other ones, or reimage the drive back and you're good to go.

When you have a moment please read the following. Realizing that you've been running this setup now for years and in those years you've almost certainly had to clean it of various issues, including probably having used a Registry Cleaner at one time or another.

Do I need a Windows Registry Cleaner?

MALWARE - ROOTKITS - TROJANS - WORMS - VIRUS

The complexity of finding, preventing, and cleanup from malware

 

[pvs]

Interesting articles, Ron, thank you for linking them.

Upset the apple cart? Well, it would have to do with the licenses, which would need to be input upon re-installation of each program. So I'd need to release the license for each one prior to re-activating on the new OS installation.  As you've noted, some of my software is (MUCH) older, and some of those manufacturers might just try to force me to purchase/rent their newer applications rather, than allow me to activate anew. And many of those newer applications would potentially not be so well suited to Windows XP. So this part of the project could get very complicated and prone to issues.

FWIW, I have looked at some information on the Internet regarding building a slip-streamed XP installation environment, and I might do that for future use.  Again, I am not completely rejecting the idea of rebuilding everything top-to-bottom.  I am just holding back right now to see if I can patch what I have, at least for the time being.  Please remember, the only REAL issue I am having with usability right now is with MBAM's Real-Time Protection, and it seems that it might simply be an incompatibility with AVAST. So I am happier simply trying to fix what I've got, than to try to restart completely, and re-configure the many systems that are installed on my rig.

As for Registry Cleaners, aye, I used to toy with one many years ago, NGB Cleaner, if I remember correctly. But I typically don't use them, as I found them to often cause more issues than they fix. I sometimes do some manual cleaning to get rid of stuff, and rely of backups in case I royally screw something up.

Anyway, it looks like I am going to need to take a break for a few days, as I wound up destroying one of my CPU Cooling Fans the other night (trying to quiet it down a bit).  Happily though, I was astonished to find that I can still purchase OEM fans that are identical, right down to the Rev Letter, to the ones that originally came with the machine!  Wow, this server is more than 12 years old, and I can still buy some OEM parts. I am amazed, and relieved that I don't need to look for something that I need to force into place.  I have ordered two of them (since the other one is noisy as hell, too), and they should be here in a few days.

On a side note, my wife is happy, as she was starting to get PO'd at me for the time I was spending on this project. LOL

One more thing - going back to your 2nd article, and it's explanation of Trojans. I thought it very strange that a Trojan would be in this file.  I wound up throwing an older HDD back into place, and I rescanned that file using a few different AV scanners, as well as MBAM.  Nothing turned up at all.  So I am pretty confident that what Kaspersky found was a false positive (32-bit scanner on 64-bit software?).  FWIW, that installer was downloaded straight from Nikon.  I scanned the installer, too, and it, too, was reported as clean.  So I reinstalled that program, and it now has it's uninstaller back.

So I'm going to be away from here for a few days, Ron.  I will let you know how things are going once I get that machine back up and running.

-pvs

[AdvancedSetup]

Understood, my wife gets a bit upset at times for all the time I spend on the computer too, but I'm trying to make a living

 

[pvs]

Hey Ron.  I just wanted to check in here, and let you know I am still alive.

More important than that, my old crusty desktop system is also still alive!  I received the parts a couple of days ago, and wound up replacing the cooling towers as well as the fans.  I've only taken the CPUs out of this system twice, and I am always anxious when I need to do so.  But I really needed to remove them in order to clean the old Arctic Silver off, and I wanted to take some photos of both sides, in case I needed to replace one or both (considering one was running without its fan for a few minutes while I shut down after destroying that fan).

Anyway, after several boot attempts with the new cooling fans and towers in place (and not being successful), I started removing and reinserting various cards in order to try to ascertain the issue.  It wound up being a need to re-seat my memory chips.  Once I did that, the machine came to life, and has been booting fine, since.  And it is MUCH more quiet than it had been, so I am very happy with that.

Going back to the issue we'd been working with, I cleaned out a lot of stuff I don't use, PS CS, PS CS2, PS CS3, PS CS4, and a few things I used to use when I was hacking an old Windows Mobile Cell Phone a few years back.  I then defragged the disk and ran  SDELETE -c to reduce the size of my resulting backup files.

After doing that, and running a backup of the machine with no AV installed, I found the machine worked well, very responsive, and MBAM worked flawlessly.  So I decided to try going back to Bitdefender Internet Security 2015, which they licensed to me instead of Bitdefender AV 2016 (which is not compatible with XP).  I had been using BD Internet Security 2015 before I had the Malwarebytes issue that brought me to start this thread.  I had found the product to make my machine run as it if were infected, and then opted for Avast!.  But I had never set the mutual exclusions between BDIS and MBAM in my first go-round.  So I've decided to give BDIS another go, but this time, with those exclusions in place.

I am happy to say the the two products seem to be working well together, though I am still trying to iron out a few things that BDIS does to my system.  I've managed to make quite a bit of progress toward that, though I am still not very happy, and MIGHT still look for a different AV alternative.

Once I am happy with whatever AV I choose, I also might try to make use of some of the tools you introduced me to, in an effort to help clean up this system a bit.  I'd also like to try making a new WinXP SP3 Installation disk, if I can still get all of those updates and SP3 online ... but I need to push that off to the wintertime, as I need to get outside and attend to some work on this old house. 

Ahhh - balance!  It's so hard to find, especially when you're as addicted to these machines as i am.

Anyway, again, I just wanted to write back, and let you know what's up with this thread.  Thank you so much for your kind help and patience with me.

-pvs

[AdvancedSetup]

@pvs

Hey, that's excellent news. Glad to hear you were able to bring the old ship around.

As for the balance, yep, I hear you loud and clear there.

I'll go ahead then and close this topic so others don't come along trying to post to it.

You take care and have fun on the new house project repairs :-)