MB 3.1.2 uninstall/reinstall fixed pblm then it happened again!

[tomseeley]

Very frustrating.  Can't start program from desktop shortcut or double clicking *.exe.  Did the usual mb-clean/reinstall routine, and it then worked.  I did a scan.  Then I did something else entirely on the computer, unrelated to MB.  That required a reboot, so I did that.  Now I'm back to square 1 for MB.  Nothing at all happens when I click on the desktop shortcut icon.  MB tray icon was there before the unrelated MB, now it's not. I will say that the unrelated issue I did reqd me to quit MB and disable AVG firewall, which I did, but after that unrelated issue, like I said, I'm dead in the water as far as MB is concerned.

I just remembered I got an email from MB earlier in July saying my regular biannual automatic update is coming due, and I ignored it because at the time I was happy with MB and I was willing to repay and re-up.  Now I'm not so sure I should have done that!

Can anyone please tell me why this keeps occurring and how to stop it once and for all?!

Here's the clean results.txt I got when I did the first clean/reinstall, if that'll help.

mb-clean-results.txt

[Porthos]

Could you go into AVG and exclude the following from all protections.

• C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes\Anti-Malware\assistant.exe
• C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes\Anti-Malware\malwarebytes_assistant.exe
• C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes\Anti-Malware\mbam.exe
• C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes\Anti-Malware\MbamPt.exe
• C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes\Anti-Malware\MBAMService.exe
• C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes\Anti-Malware\mbamtray.exe
• C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes\Anti-Malware\MBAMWsc.exe
• C:\Windows\system32\Drivers\farflt.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\drivers\mbae64.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\drivers\mbam.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\drivers\MBAMChameleon.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\drivers\MBAMSwissArmy.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\drivers\mwac.sys

Also please exclude the following folders too: (The complete folder)

• C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes\Anti-Malware
• C:\ProgramData\Malwarebytes\MBAMService

[AdvancedSetup]

Hi @tomseeley

It very well could be some type of corruption in AVG. I've seen quite a few users have issues with AVG that an uninstall, reboot, and reinstall of AVG has corrected multiple issues for them. I can't promise that is your issue here, and yes, it's annoying to spend time doing the removal and reinstall, but I would recommend giving it a try.

If that does not work then we'd need to dig in further and get some other logs to see what's causing the issue.

Avast Announces Agreement to Acquire AVG for $1.3B

Avast Closes Acquisition of AVG Technologies

 

Thanks

Ron

 

Edited July 31, 2017 by AdvancedSetup

[tomseeley]

Hi.  Tuesday morning here.  Thank you both for your help so far.

This morning, before checking the MB forum and finding your answers, I did another complete mbclean/reinstall.  It worked properly   While at my dashboard, I did a successful scan.  I confirmed my autoupdate and autoscan schedule settings.  I closed my dashboard.  At that point, the MB icon was in the system tray.  I right clicked it and clicked "quit MB".  I then shut down completely (not just "restart").  I restarted and logged in.  The MB tray icon was not in the tray at that time, and nothing I did to the desktop shortcut had any effect at all.

At that point, I logged into the MB forum and found the notification that you both had posted answers to my most recent request for help (not clear why I didn't get an email saying that had happened, but that's a different issue. I probably just forgot to choose that when I posted.  Whatever...). 

At this point, I have done what Porthos has told me to do, as noted below (not entirely successful). 

Porthos, I've gone into AVG and excluded everything you listed except one item.  I simply cannot find any path named C:\ProgramData\...anything.

I've got everything else in your list excluded and I've "apply"ed the list of exceptions in AVG but I have not done anything else yet.  What should I do next, please?

Tom

[Porthos]

9 minutes ago, tomseeley said:

I then shut down completely (not just "restart").  I restarted and logged in. 

A shutdown on Win 10 is not a complete shutdown.

You're running Windows 10, which has a feature known as Fast Startup enabled by default. When you "shut down" your computer, you're not fully shutting it down. You're essentially putting it into a low power hibernation state that allows the machine to start up faster the next time. If you want to fully shut down your Windows 8/8.1/10 computer, you need to use the restart option; not the Shut Down option. This will shut down your computer fully and of course, restart it as well.

[tomseeley]

Huh.  Shows what I know!    I take language and words literally!  That gets me in trouble sometimes.  When I pick up a box of Cheerios in the store, and I see where it says "open here",  I go "no, I don't want to open it here!  I want to wait till I get home!".  I thought "shut down" meant "shut the **** thing down!".  Come to find out it doesn't really mean that at all,  I need to "restart" to "shut down".  okayyyyyyyyyyyyyy.......................

So, back to the initial question:  Now that I've entered the exceptions in AVG, other than the one path you cited that I can't find, what do I do next?  Shall I do the "restart" first?  Or run an AVG scan? 

[Porthos]

Restart.

[tomseeley]

OK. I did the restart.  No effect at all.  System tray icon missing.  No response at all to anything with desktop short cut.

 

[tomseeley]

Not that this is related to MB at all, but I'm grasping at straws.  I also have experienced a failure of my Canon scanner driver software.  Nothing I've done to that has solved that problem either.  I'm wondering if doing the uninstall/reboot/reinstall of AVG is worth a try, as Ron, above, proposed, to see what, if anything, that does for my mutiple problems.  Your thoughts please?

[Porthos]

59 minutes ago, tomseeley said:

I'm wondering if doing the uninstall/reboot/reinstall of AVG is worth a try, as Ron, above, proposed,

I would leave it uninstalled and let Windows Defender enable it self for a few days to see how every thing works then.

[tomseeley]

OK.  I'll try that next.  But not right now.  Got other stuff to do at Lowes/Home Depot, etc.

[AdvancedSetup]

Windows Defender on Windows 10 is probably as good or better than AVG at least in some respects so the computer will be protected pretty well while AVG is not installed.

See if you can get Malwarebytes working well without AVG on the box. We can also look at your Canon driver issue if you like after this.

Ron

 

[tomseeley]

Hey Thanks, AdvancedSetup!

I have uninstalled AVG.  I turned on Windows Defender and Windows Firewall.  I did another complete Malwarebytes clean/reinstall.   I then did a quick scan in Windows Defender. No problems.  I then did a full MB scan.  No problems.  I then went and did a bunch of other stuff, on the computer and elsewhere. I logged off.  I logged back on a couple hours later, and MB was still functional.  Tray icon still present.  I have not done any restart, shut down, or reboot, other than what was required by the MB clean/reinstall.  So far so good.

[tomseeley]

Nope.  As of 3:09 pm EDT, after doing some non-MB stuff, and a restart, just to see what it does, I'm back to square 1.  No response at all to desktop shortcut.  No MB tray icon.  I give up.  I guess all I can do is do a complete clean/reinstall every time I think of running MB.  I wish I hadn't just paid for a renewal.

Amy more suggestions, I'm listening, but without holding my breath.  Apparently whatever is wrong on my machine, and I'm sure that's where the problem is, I can't fix it.

[AdvancedSetup]

Hi Tom,

Sorry to hear of the continued issues. We can certainly offer you a refund if that's what you'd like to do, but we're not done and not leaving you behind on this. If you're willing to continue looking at this we'd love to help you get it working properly.

Please follow the steps from the post here again, and we'll review all the logs with our QA Team as well and see if we can find out what's causing the issue.

Thank you and let me know what you'd like to do.

Ron

 

 

[AdvancedSetup]

@tomseeley

Can you please try to boot into safe mode and open Malwarebytes, then go to Settings -> Protection, and turn off the self-protection option. Then restart the computer and see if things are working again.
 

[tomseeley]

Thanx again. I'll get to this thurs or Friday. I appreciate your help!

[tomseeley]

Ok.  Noon thurs here. I've just boooted in safe mode with networking, hoping to be able to do what you suggested and then email you the results.  But nothing I do to try to start MB works. So I can't start it unless I do another complete MBclean/reinstalll. I don't know if I could do that from safe mode in my present configuration. And if I do another complete resrart in normal mode,and the clean/reinstall MB, I suspect that as soon as I then reboot in safe mode, that's what seems to disable MB!  And if I boot up normally and do a MBclean/reinstall, then starting MB to disable self protection won't be possible while in safe mode!

sounds like Catch 22 to me!

im trying the MBclean/reinstall while in safe mode.  I'll keep you posted. 

And thanks again.

And finally, I apologize for the rude remark about having paid to renew.  It was a cheap shot.  Of course I'll pay and keep MB premium.  At the very least, I can always do a MBclean/reinstall anytime I want to run it.

[tomseeley]

12:45 pm here, EDT.  I'm almost out of time till Monday.  No problem with that; just saying...

I got the MBclean to work while in safe mode, as far as asking if I wanted to reboot.  I said yes, and it did.  But once I got back to the signin page and relogged in, it never offered to reinstall the new MB.exe file.  So I tried installing an older version I happened to have on my downloads folder.  It did install, but while I was in normal mode, not safe mode, trying to disable self-protection didn't work.  So I'm still at square 1.

However...I've just noticed one strange thing.  The reason it's strange, other than I don't understand what it is, is that I sort of recall that it first occurred about 3 months ago, which is about when the strangeness with MB started occurring.  At the upper right corner of Firefox, (see "capture" screenshot), there is a blue icon.  When I hover over it, it says FileConvertor.  When I left click it, capture2 shows up on my screen.  It functions sort of like Google search if I type something in the window in the center.  This appears in the Firefox URL address window:

moz-extension://8c390796-e4df-47e1-9881-016d382f02ee/newtab/blank.html#newTab

I vaguely know what a moz-extension is, but I have no idea how this came to be on my machine.  I don't know what it does.  I can't find anything like FileConvertor in my downloads or Program Files or Program Files (x86) folders so I can't remove or uninstall anything.  Does any of this ring any bells?

One last thing: occasionally, during a restart or a reboot, and not only when I restart or reboot while trying to fix this MB issue, I'll get a message on the blue screen just before it all goes dark that says something like "Acronis true image is terminating the current process.  The computer will shut down in about two minutes."  Then the restart process continues/completes itself properly, just a few seconds later.  Acronis is my hard drive backup software.  I've got it set to do automatic incrmeental backups at 2 or 3 in the morning, and I've always thought that was all that it did.  I have no idea what it might be doing in the background at this time of day.  But it has been doing it for a couple years now and the MB problems are much more recent that that.  So I'm inclined to think this isn't related.  I'm just trying to share everything I can think of with you.

Thx again.  And I may be offline till Monday from this point forward.  I'll read msgs but I won't be able to respond or take any suggested action.

Tom Seeley

[AdvancedSetup]

Very strange indeed Tom.

The Firefox is not an install, just appears to be an extension that leads to that page. It converts different file formats from one to another. A browser reset should fix that, but it should not be having any effect on our program. I'm wondering if you may have some type of new rootkit as there is one out there now that is blocking our program. Let me have you run the following scanner for me when you get time on Monday.

If I don't reply back on Monday please send me a private message reply to remind me. I get busy and can sometimes overlook some posts while working on various issues.

 

Then post back those logs. We'll probably end up needing other logs, but this should help us to see if maybe a rootkit is behind this or not.

Thanks again

Ron

 

[tomseeley]

OK Ron.  Thx again.  I reviewed the post you referenced.  I see that the scan could take hours.  So I will, in fact, wait till Monday to do what the post requests.

But before signing off, I want to mention another item.  I just logged on this morning, to run Excel, before I did anything else.  I then opened Firefox, so I could email the file I had created to the chap who needs it. Before launching gmail, I did go to Firefox Add-ons and removed completely the FileCreator add-on extension.  I don't need it, and I don't even remember how I managed to put it on the machine, so it's history.

But as I was doing this, while Firefox was opening itself, a new tab popped up called Malwarebytes.  It contains a message from MB saying it had just blocked a bad URL or unwanted program.  So it appears that even though I still can't open my MB dashboard, it must be doing something in the background.  Is this what you'd expect, under my circumstances?

I did click on "learn more" but it's what you'd expect, and I won't cut/paste it here.  It doesn't seem to indicate what site was blocked.

However, one thing more...when I went back to Excel, once I had Firefox open and the FileCreator extension removed completely (I did not do any sort of close/reopen Firefox), when I attached the Excel file to my gmail msg, the mail did not get sent.  Gmail hung up.  I had to sign out and sign back in and do that step over again from scratch.  On the 2nd try, it did attach and the msg did get sent.

Strangeness never goes away, does it!

T

[AdvancedSetup]

Yes, computers can be annoying at times. Do as I say dear computer :-)

The removal of a plugin could cause issues that may have required a couple of browser restarts.

 

 

Please visit each of the following sites and let's reset all of your browsers back to defaults to prevent unexpected issues.
If you are not using one of the browsers but it is installed then you may want to consider uninstalling it as older versions of some software can pose an increase in the potential for an infection to get in.

Internet Explorer
How to reset Internet Explorer settings

Firefox
Click on Help / Troubleshooting Information then click on the Reset Firefox button.

Chrome

I would like to reset Chrome back to defaults to completely clear out what is going on with Chrome.

You can keep your “Bookmarks” if you want to keep them, but you have to export them first – >> Export Bookmarks << – Everything else should be removed.

Then I need you to go to >> Google Sync << and sign into your account.
Scroll down until you see the “reset sync” button and click on the button
At the prompt click on “Ok”.

.
Reset Your Browser Settings
.

1. In the top-right corner of the browser window, click the “Chrome Menu” icon (Three horizontal lines)
2. Select “Settings”.
3. At the bottom, click “Show advanced settings…”
4. Scroll down until you see “Reset settings”, Then click on the button “Reset Settings”.
5. In the dialog that appears, click “Reset”.

.
Close Chrome and restart it and check it out for me please

[tomseeley]

Sunday night here.  Home from a weekend out of town, with everything completely unplugged before we left Friday. Completely unable to start up the computer at all. Hardware issue, not software.  No idea even where to start but completely dead in the water.  CPU seems to start and go through boot up.  Monitor power is on.  But all we see on the monitor is a split-second-long very very faint image of something that looks, as it flashes by faintly, like part of the usual desktop startup routime.  The Dell logo. Etc.  So I can't do anything at all about anything, much less the MB issue you've been helping me with. Once I'm back in business, which could take days, I'll recheck in with you.  

Thx

Tom Seeley 

[AdvancedSetup]

Please try manually / physically removing all power from the Monitor, Computer, and Router. Let stay off a couple minutes. Power on the Router first. Then the Monitor, then the Computer.

Let me know how that goes. There should also be a power switch on the back of the computer that is part of the actual power supply. Some have an On/Off switch (be careful though and read it, some are to switch from 110 volt to 220 volt. Don't change that).