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Another Windows 7 x64 freeze after the 1.0.508 update


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We're looking for volunteers to assist with the troubleshooting of this issue by performing Kernel-Mode debugging on the affected machine. This is quite an in-depth process that has a few specific prerequisites. If anyone is interested, please let me know and I'll send you a message with the details. 

Thank you!

Edited by LiquidTension
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I'll try to help out if possible; premium MBAM end-user with a custom built PC.

 

My PC's been freezing since Jan 7th, not a blue screen crash, just hangs on the desktop or whatever application I have open and all inputs become unresponsive. Only way to resolve is a hard reboot. The freezing I've been encountering seems to be aggressive, one time it froze less than five minutes after boot up to the desktop. A couple of other times it's been roughly 10 to 20 minutes into normal use (Web browsing, playing games, opening applications, etc.). Spent a whole day in safe mode toggling programs on and off one by one trying to isolate who was the culprit without any success and it was driving me insane. Various google searches yielded the problem was likely hardware-related and I dreaded having to tear apart my PC to begin troubleshooting for reasons I won't go into.

 

Started checking the official forums of all the software I routinely use and ended up here. Good thing I came across this thread before I started removing RAM, video cards, heatsinks/fans, and dozens of other parts. For now I've just outright exited Malwarebytes immediately after startup (Right-click the notification area icon > "Quit Malwarebytes") and waited a few hours to see what happens; so far so good, no freezes. Might try launching it again later and disabling both the Web Protection and Ransomware Protection like suggested in the workaround. Attached zip file with logs as instructed from pinned thread. Brief overview provided below; I don't have multiple network adapters so I cannot test step #5.

 

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 x64

CPU: Intel Core i5 4570 @ 3.20GHz

RAM: 16GB DDR3

Motherboard: MSI Z87-G45

Network Adapter: Killer E2200 Gigabit Ethernet Controller

Storage: 500GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO, two 1TB Seagate ST1000DM003, 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001

Some common programs I use frequently on this PC include Steam and Blizzard Battle.net (Both digital game distribution platforms), Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Security Essentials (Antivirus), Spybot Search & Destroy, Malwarebytes, Adobe Acrobat, Nvidia GeForce Experience, Notepad++, VideoLAN/VLC Media Player, Microsoft Office 2013, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2013.

mbst-grab-results.zip

NetworkAdapter.jpg

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Dear @LiquidTension 

I've sporadically freezes. But it is NOT limited to Windows 7. I was running 1803 and now am 1809 now since 16.12.2018.

I really considered this to be a Hardware issue as 2 other PCs in my Household having the same MBAM and premium have no issues whatsoever.

have the requested logs attached. Given the reliability history it is interfering with Samsung NVME 3.0 Driver? At least this seems to be the last call. My OS drive is not using this but Intel RST Drivers.

 

What I do notice is that the Freeze happens more often when PC is "idle", while I could Play a game for hours or run Hyper-V loads  

mbst-grab-results.zip

mbam_msinfo.zip

mbam.PNG

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4 hours ago, LiquidTension said:

We're looking for volunteers to assist with the troubleshooting of this issue by performing Kernel-Mode debugging on the affected machine. This is quite an in-depth process that has a few specific prerequisites. If anyone is interested, please let me know and I'll send you a message with the details. 

Thank you!

I'm willing to pitch in... when the PC is not busy doing its job. Please let me know what's involved.

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I have a Samsung 960 PRO and am using the same driver on Windows 7 on an Intel Z170 board (IRST+Samsung SecNVME drivers; both must be installed to function/for the best speed/performance) and have had no issues with build 508 of Malwarebytes.  I do however typically keep Ransomware Protection disabled as I've pretty much always done so since learning of its function as being more of a reactive tool than a proactive one (it only detects an already active/installed threat based on behavior, and since I trust the other layers/modules to prevent any threats from getting in, this module seems redundant and not worth the performance degradation caused by enabling it).  I have tested with it on to see if I could replicate any of the issues being reported but haven't seen any of them show up so far.

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7 hours ago, LiquidTension said:

We're looking for volunteers to assist with the troubleshooting of this issue by performing Kernel-Mode debugging on the affected machine. This is quite an in-depth process that has a few specific prerequisites. If anyone is interested, please let me know and I'll send you a message with the details. 

Thank you!

I am willing to help with this as soon as possible - Need to get to the bottom of this.

Thanks

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If your looking for more users with this problem I just made a post about my PC locking up, I wish I saw this thread before I created a post about it.

I have 2 PC's (both Dells) with Windows 7 on them (one has W7 ultimate, the other has W7 pro) that are freezing up totally at random times, you have to do a complete power down to unfreeze them, I have run all hardware tests and ran tweak on the OS, nothing found, all malware tests and AV tests find zip.

Both PC's started doing this around mid December of 2018, is this a bug in a W7 update???

I would love to hear about a fix or possible cause for this.

 

And have no idea on what this ""Kernel-Mode debugging"" would be, I'm a hardware guy, this software is beyond me, but if I can help please contact me. 

 

Terryl

Edited by Terryl
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The following may be unrelated to this forum topic....   I don't know?

Mid-December my Win7 64 Pro desktop started just freezing, apparently at random. No keyboard or mouse action, just a frozen display of whatever I was doing. (In particular, starting Windows Live Mail 2012 always resulted in a lock-up while the program was opening). I had to long-press power button to re-boot. (Very) Long story short I restored the PC using a Macrium reflect image from February 2018.

This did the trick until I gradually caught up with Windows 7 updates in late December and found the freezing problem recurring.  Intenet research revealed that KB4483187, a critical security update for Internet Explorer 11 was implicated in causing these freezes (AskWoody web-site), so I uninstalled it, using system restore, and my PC was again back to normal....   no freezes during Christmas break and right up until this morning!

But today I've got a strange issue....   if I go to the Lloyds bank Log-in page in Google Chrome the page becomes unresponsive and I have to "Close the unresponsive program", (mouse still works to do this.) When Chrome has been closed it will not re-open until I shut down and re-start the PC.

Then I found this forum topic. I've now discovered that every time I try using the Lloyds (or "Halifax" very similar) Log-In page with MalwareBytes Web Protection ON, the page freezes. But if I Iturn OFF Web Protection the Log-In pages work fine.

I've turned OFF Web Protection, Installed the MalwareBytes Chrome browser extension, and crossed my fingers.

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21 hours ago, AverageJoe said:

My PC's been freezing since Jan 7th, not a blue screen crash, just hangs on the desktop or whatever application I have open and all inputs become unresponsive. Only way to resolve is a hard reboot. The freezing I've been encountering seems to be aggressive, one time it froze less than five minutes after boot up to the desktop. A couple of other times it's been roughly 10 to 20 minutes into normal use (Web browsing, playing games, opening applications, etc.). Spent a whole day in safe mode toggling programs on and off one by one trying to isolate who was the culprit without any success and it was driving me insane. Various google searches yielded the problem was likely hardware-related and I dreaded having to tear apart my PC to begin troubleshooting for reasons I won't go into.

I had this exact same issue starting a couple of days ago under Windows 7 Ultimate. First the screen would freeze 5-20 minutes after boot, followed by mouse. Seemed random. Only solution was to unplug computer and power back up. I disabled Web protection and ransomeware protection on Malwarebytes and have had no freezing in last several hours.

I think this was associated with freezes:

Event 219, Kernel-PnP

The driver \Driver\WUDFRd failed to load for the device WpdBusEnumRoot\UMB\2&37c186b&0&STORAGE#VOLUME#_??_USBSTOR#DISK&VEN_GENERIC&PROD_USB_CF_READER&REV_1.01#18E3312D81B&1#.

thanks,

Mainer1967

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Is there a technical reason why Malwarebytes never considered pushing clients back to the previous version that did not experience the freeze issue until troubleshooting and a solution is identified?  I can't imagine the troubleshooting and frustration that effected users are going through, especially those without the technical skills to know where to begin, what to test, and where to look for help.  Until a toggle or turning off Malwarebytes completely is performed, Malwarebytes may be one of the last things that your clients are looking at.    I appreciate the consistent communication from Malwarebytes now in the forum.  Thank you.

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7 minutes ago, abs7125 said:

Will Maleware be providing refunds, as we have not been able to use the software, for a month now?? 

Yes, getting a refund shouldn't be a problem if you wish to cancel your subscription.  You'll need to contact the e-commerce vendor that processed your purchase/renewal and both of their contact info can be found in this support article.  If you aren't sure which one handled your account you may refer to your confirmation email from your original purchase if you still have it, but if not then you should be able to contact either vendor and they will confirm whether you made your purchase through them or not.

If you have any trouble then you may contact Malwarebytes Support directly via the options found on this page and they will assist you.

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32 minutes ago, mkaz said:

Is there a technical reason why Malwarebytes never considered pushing clients back to the previous version that did not experience the freeze issue until troubleshooting and a solution is identified?  I can't imagine the troubleshooting and frustration that effected users are going through, especially those without the technical skills to know where to begin, what to test, and where to look for help.  Until a toggle or turning off Malwarebytes completely is performed, Malwarebytes may be one of the last things that your clients are looking at.    I appreciate the consistent communication from Malwarebytes now in the forum.  Thank you.

Here - https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/241223-malwarebytes-for-windows-and-windows-7-freezelock-up/ :

Quote

Known Workarounds:
It has been reported that either of the following workarounds have a high success rate in mitigating the issue entirely.

  1. Disable Malwarebytes for Windows Web Protection....
  2. Revert to the previous Malwarebytes for Windows components package.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, torus_ot said:

Known Workarounds:
It has been reported that either of the following workarounds have a high success rate in mitigating the issue entirely.

 

@torus_ot, thx.  I've been following this forum and commenting on it since Dec. 19th and know very well of the reporting you cited.  My comments were simply in support of Malwarebyte users that have no clue of this forum, do not know how to troubleshoot it, have been battling the freeze issue, may have spent countless hours of time and frustration and perhaps even reloading the Windows OS only to have the issue come back if they re-install Malwarebytes.  It seems to me that regardless what  the culprit is, an automated downgrade of Malwarebytes would have resolved a lot of frustration and may still resolve a lot of frustration given this is going on for a month or so now.  This does not stop Malwarebytes for moving forward with identification of a solution.

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Apologies, you mentioned a refund in your comment so I assumed you meant a cancellation.  As far as I know there is no way for Malwarebytes to modify the duration of a license key/subscription and I'm not aware of any kind of compensation for issues like this.  That said, you can contact Malwarebytes Support directly and speak with them about it if you wish as it couldn't hurt to ask.  They may be contacted via the options in the link I provided in my response above.

As for why they haven't rolled everyone back, I'm not certain that would be possible since the program would recognize that the currently installed/running version is newer than the one being hosted on the update servers so it wouldn't even download it, and even if it were somehow forced to (which is not a capability the product currently has as far as I know; it must see a newer/higher version number as I understand it to even initiate the download), it wouldn't launch the installer after downloading for the same reason, because it would identify it as an older build of the product.

This would also disrupt all of the users unaffected by this issue if it were somehow possible, though I don't have any exact numbers on how many users have received the new build vs the number of users affected by these issues (I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64 here and have had no issues with it so far, and I installed it on the day it was first released, though obviously that's just a sample size of 1 so not exactly definitive evidence of how many may or may not be affected).

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I have used Malwarebytes non-premium version for many years and I greatly appreciate the various anti-malware resources that MB has provided for free.   Thank you MB.  The cost of the premium version is trivial when you consider the value. 

However, my time and piece-of-mind is not trivial.  I only happened to discover the freeze conflict with Malwarebytes Premium by chance, and it still took me a couple of days to confirm after searching the web and some trial-and-error.  The holiday period actually helped because I had some free time to investigate.  Luckily, the problem was obvious and simple to uncover, which has not been the case in the past.  Like several other posters, I was just about to go down some software and hardware rabbit holes that would have been unnecessary and painful, but stopped short mostly due to the forums, which were crucial in this case.  Doctors promise to "first do no harm."   This should apply to MS updates and anti-malware as well.  

This has got to be an awful problem to fix.  I am skeptical but hopeful that MB will eventually fix it.   Good luck. 

 

 

 

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For what it's worth: I ran into this problem on my Windows 7 x64. Prior to stumbling onto this forum topic, I suspected it was the Norton software that I run alongside my Malwarebytes installation causing the problem, because on the worse days, I would temporarily disable the "auto protect" on Norton to get any work done. The computer would work fine upon disabling this module, but obviously that wasn't the ideal solution. After coming across the information presented here, it occured to me that the problem did coincide with my update of Malwarebytes to 10508. I have now reverted my installation back to Malwarebytes version: 3.6.1.2711 Component package version: 1.0.482 using the instructions provided here and the problem has been fixed. Malwarebytes, Norton & Windows 7 are all working in concert once again.

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