[Possible BUG] System tray icon missin when fast start is on

[Xauma95]

I don't know if this only happens to me but if i enable fast start on windows 10 and shut down the computer when i turn it on the tray aplication doen't start.

Running the lastest version

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[dcollins]

Thanks for this report. We have this defect logged so we can look into it.

[Xauma95]

4 minutes ago, dcollins said:

Thanks for this report. We have this defect logged so we can look into it.

ok thank you, i'll be waiting for a fix, untill then i will have to disable fast start

[Xauma95]

Any news about this issue?

[exile360]

It hasn't been fixed yet to my knowledge, however a fix for it might be included in the next release depending on whether or not the Dev team was able to track down the cause and code a fix.  I would recommend keeping an eye on the changelogs for each release as they come up to see if they've addressed it, as that's where they document bugs fixed and new features for each release.

Whenever a new version comes out they create a new pinned topic here to announce it along with the list of changes.

[Xauma95]

ok thank you for answer me

[exile360]

You're welcome

Hopefully this bug gets fixed soon so that users may use Fast Start again without it causing problems for Malwarebytes.

[Xauma95]

23 hours ago, exile360 said:

You're welcome

Hopefully this bug gets fixed soon so that users may use Fast Start again without it causing problems for Malwarebytes.

I hope that too cause i want the fast start enabled so bad hahaha, my computer takes too long to start up

[Xauma95]

Any news about this bug?

[plb4333]

On 4/10/2018 at 6:23 AM, Xauma95 said:

I don't know if this only happens to me but if i enable fast start on windows 10 and shut down the computer when i turn it on the tray aplication doen't start.

Running the lastest version

I'm not sure if MBAM v3.5 addresses the Fast Start issue or not, but as a temporary work around, you could copy/paste the (mbamtray.exe) from MalwareBytes folder and place it in your Start Menu and within the 'Startup folder'. I would think this would make it always load at boot.

I use Win7 don't know how the Start Menu looks in Win10, but thought it might have the StartUp folder under All Programs menu

[Xauma95]

18 hours ago, plb4333 said:

I'm not sure if MBAM v3.5 addresses the Fast Start issue or not, but as a temporary work around, you could copy/paste the (mbamtray.exe) from MalwareBytes folder and place it in your Start Menu and within the 'Startup folder'. I would think this would make it always load at boot.

I use Win7 don't know how the Start Menu looks in Win10, but thought it might have the StartUp folder under All Programs menu

Thanks it works for now hahaha

[exile360]

Nice find.  I'll be sure to inform the team about this as a temporary fix while we're waiting for a permanent fix from the Dev team  

[lmacri]

On 4/13/2018 at 11:18 AM, exile360 said:

...Hopefully this bug gets fixed soon so that users may use Fast Start again without it causing problems for Malwarebytes.

The Win 8.x / Win 10 Fast Startup feature can't be the only culprit since users with older operating systems have been reporting for several months now that the MB icon will often fail to load in the system tray at boot-up.  See my Aug 2017 thread MB v3.2.2 - System Tray Icon Missing After mbamtray.exe APPCRASH for one example.

Several affected users have reported that their MB icon will also load in the system tray at boot-up if they temporarily disable MB v3 self-protection (Settings | Protection | Startup Options | Enable Self-Protection Module | OFF).  See Malwarebytes employee dcollins' Dec 2017 post # 85 in MadDemon64's Malwarebytes System Tray Icon Missing After Latest Update as well as user feedback on pages 4 and 5 of that thread regarding that self-protection test.  Disabling self-protection is not a recommended solution but the test results indicate that Fast Startup is not the only cause of this problem.

Just an aside, but Win 8.x / Win 10 using a Norton antivirus product are always advised to disable the Fast Startup feature because this hybrid boot-up is known to interfere with loading of Norton services at boot-up and disrupt product updates, and Fast Startup can cause all sorts of odd glitches and unexpected behaviour in this AV.  Norton Guru peterweb has posted about this in his thread Windows 8/8.1 or 10 and Fast Start Feature.
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32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox ESR v52.7.4 * NS Premium v22.14.0.54 * MB Premium v3.4.5.2467-1.0.342

Edited May 7, 2018 by lmacri

[Irhere]

Good Morning, (Los Angeles, CA time)

I found out a while back that fast start, Norton, & Malwarebytes, at times do not get along.

When a windows update/upgrade is pushed fast start is turned on by default & again needs to be turned off should you not want it to run.

I find that fast start at times can also affect the release of memory & can lead to a slow almost unusable computer. Leaving your computer on 24 hours with no shut down also can make a difference.

Right now it seems that with fast start on, they are working OK with each other. Fast start changes both the shutdown time & the boot time. When I time the difference between on or off it is not enough to cause a concern as long as computer is working OK, & I can wait the few seconds difference.

Win 10 (spring update 1803), MB Premium, NS Premium, Firefox

 

[exile360]

I believe that the primary issue is timing.  When Malwarebytes starts, it first loads the service and drivers, then the tray which handles notifications etc., but when Fast Start is active, it alters the timing and attempts to keep certain components in memory (including drivers and background services I believe) which means that, since the service is already running, it doesn't attempt to go through its normal startup process and thus never attempts to launch the tray process as it would normally.  This also explains why placing a shortcut to the mbamtray.exe file in the Startup folder resolves the issue and gets it to run on system start.

The reason the tray process doesn't continue to run after shutdown/restart when Fast Start is active is likely because, unlike the other components of Malwarebytes, it is a user mode process, not a kernel mode/SYSTEM driver or service, and I believe all user mode processes are terminated during shutdown even when Fast Start is active.

I could be wrong, but this is my hypothesis based on my observations so far.

Also, with regards to the other reports of problems with the tray process on older operating systems, I believe they are either not related or have already been resolved for the most part since they show the process crashing; something that does not seem to be occurring on affected systems with Fast Start enabled.

The Developers are investigating this issue and do plan to have it fixed if possible in a future release, although I do not know when that will be at this time.

[lmacri]

4 hours ago, exile360 said:

I believe that the primary issue is timing.  When Malwarebytes starts, it first loads the service and drivers, then the tray which handles notifications etc., but when Fast Start is active, it alters the timing and attempts to keep certain components in memory (including drivers and background services I believe) which means that, since the service is already running, it doesn't attempt to go through its normal startup process and thus never attempts to launch the tray process as it would normally.  This also explains why placing a shortcut to the mbamtray.exe file in the Startup folder resolves the issue and gets it to run on system start.

The reason the tray process doesn't continue to run after shutdown/restart when Fast Start is active is likely because, unlike the other components of Malwarebytes, it is a user mode process, not a kernel mode/SYSTEM driver or service, and I believe all user mode processes are terminated during shutdown even when Fast Start is active....

Hi exile360:

I raised the timing / order that processes load at boot-up on my Vista SP2 machine as a possible factor in post # 6 of my thread MB v3.2.2 - SystemTray Icon Missing After mbamtray.exe APPCRASH in Sept 2017.  Two instances of the main Norton executable NSBU.exe (now named nortonsecurity.exe since Norton v22.12 was released) load at Windows startup - the first to load is owned by the SYSTEM (for real-time protection) and the second to load is owned by USER (for managing lower-priority tasks like loading of the Norton GUI). My image in post # 13 of that thread shows that mbamtray.exe always attempts to load simultaneously with this second instance of the Norton executable that is owned by the USER.

I don't know if it's relevant, but file scans in Norton now execute in user mode rather than kernel mode since the redesigned SDS (Symantec Data Scanner) scan engine was introduced in v22.7 to address possible memory corruption issues discussed in the Symantec security advisory SYM16-010 - see Introducing Symantec Data Scanner (SDS) Technology.
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32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox ESR v52.7.4 * NS Premium v22.14.0.54 * MB Premium v3.4.5.2467-1.0.342

Edited May 7, 2018 by lmacri

[Xauma95]

Hi guys do you know if the issues is solved with the new update?

[exile360]

No, I don't believe this issue was corrected in version 3.5.1 because it wasn't discovered until version 3.5 was already completed/finalized/in beta.  That said, there are a lot of fixes and improvements in version 3.5.1 so it's definitely worth the upgrade just for that.  If you do install 3.5.1, which we obviously do recommend, go ahead and test it with Fast Start if you would and let us know how it goes.  It is possible that one of the other changes in the build may have corrected this by happy coincidence.

If you do test it out, please let us know how it goes.

Thanks

[lmacri]

5 hours ago, exile360 said:

No, I don't believe this issue was corrected in version 3.5.1 because it wasn't discovered until version 3.5 was already completed/finalized/in beta....

Hi exile360:

I don't think this was a new issue for v3.4.5.  OP Xauma95 was using MB v3.3.1 on their Win 10 / Avast IS machine when they first reported this problem in their November 2017 thread Tray Application Doesn't Work.  See Portho's suggestion to disable Fast Startup in post # 12 of that thread as well as Malwarebytes employee vbarytskyy's 30-Nov-2017 reply in post #15, stating:

Quote

"We are working on looking into this issue and our engineers have been made aware.  As it'll most likely require a fix in our code, we currently have no timeline on a fix."

I've been following several threads in this forum where users began reporting their MB system tray icon intermittently failed to load at boot-up after MB v3.2.2 was released in August 2017, including calintexas' September 2017 thread mbamtray.exe Doesn't Always Start Since 3.22 Install about a Win 10 machine running Norton 360.
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32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox ESR v52.8.0 * Norton Security Premium v22.14.0.54 * MB Premium v3.5.1.2522-1.0.365

Edited May 12, 2018 by lmacri

[exile360]

Yes, but I think the connection with Fast Start wasn't discovered until much later, which was the big clue and likely what will be the area the Devs must focus on to fix it (assuming it can be fixed as it's possible that due to the nature of how Fast Start works that it might not be fixable).

The problem with Fast Start, at least as I understand it, is that it attempts to keep system drivers and services loaded into memory while terminating all user mode processes, similar to what happens when you log off but don't shut down the computer fully.  The problem is that when you resume using Fast Start, it doesn't reinitialize the service, and since part of the service's loading process is to launch the tray (a user mode process), the tray is never loaded, thus the issue occurs.

A possible workaround would be to change how the tray is launched and rather than having the service do it, use a more traditional startup entry for it like the Startup folder in the START menu or one of the RUN keys in the registry.  The trouble with that approach is it's not as reliable as having it start through the service, since the service can control the timing and order of how things are loaded (such as the protection drivers and the scheduler), thus avoiding issues like the tray announcing that protection is disabled just because one of the drivers or the service hasn't loaded yet (I believe this was also one of the reasons it was implemented this way because that was an issue in the past where it would falsely alert that protection was off just because it hadn't started yet when the tray was already running).

In the meantime I would suggest creating a shortcut to mbamtray.exe and placing it in the user's Startup folder in the START menu and that should resolve it, or at least it has so far for those who have done it and have kept Fast Start enabled.  Maybe the Dev team can implement something in the installer to detect Fast Start and place a shortcut in one of the loading points to the tray, although as I said there could be consequences, plus it would remain even if the user later disabled Fast Start which itself might also be problematic since both the service and the startup entry would try to load an instance of the tray (though I don't know if 2 copies of the tray would actually load in such a scenario or if the second one would be ignored).

[digmorcrusher]

I've had this issue for months, 3.5 seems to have fixed it for me,

[Xauma95]

17 hours ago, digmorcrusher said:

I've had this issue for months, 3.5 seems to have fixed it for me,

ok i will try enable fast start and see if its works

[MadDemon64]

On 5/12/2018 at 4:23 PM, digmorcrusher said:

I've had this issue for months, 3.5 seems to have fixed it for me,

When I upgraded to 3.4 the problem went away, and it seemed to have gone away with 3.5, but just today it happened again.

3.5 has definitely improved the stability of the program and even made it less likely to crash, but it hasn't actually fixed the issue.

[Xauma95]

On 5/18/2018 at 3:28 PM, MadDemon64 said:

When I upgraded to 3.4 the problem went away, and it seemed to have gone away with 3.5, but just today it happened again.

3.5 has definitely improved the stability of the program and even made it less likely to crash, but it hasn't actually fixed the issue.

what i've done to solve this issue is with a program called revo uninstaller i've added mbamtray to my startup and finally when i enable fast start it works fine for now..