Another Windows 7 x64 freeze after the 1.0.508 update

[Dave_H]

I keep thinking about all the people who are experiencing lockups that have no idea what is causing the problem.  Most people may not be experianced enough to figure out it's malwarebytes.  Even I thought it was a hardware problem and wasted several days in that direction.

You really should consider rolling back systems to the previous component package, send out the previous one as a live update.  If your able to send out the "update" to only windows 7 systems, all the better.  If you have to send it out to everyone than do it, if it was good enough a couple months ago it's good enough until you get this all figured out.  You need to think hard about the benefits of the 508 component package verses the negative impact of an unknown number of windows 7 users.

Thats just my honest opinion,

Dave

[Stop_The_Madness]

22 minutes ago, Dave_H said:

 BIG +1.

 

[n8lbv]

I've had a number of clients over the past 3 weeks with this issue and I know for sure more are going to pile in.  
Some of my clients that have had the issue are 1-3 hours drive time from here and in each case it appeared to be a hardware issue by it's symptoms and
was not something that could be resolved/figured out remotely without this new knowledge. 
I'm very technically capable and experienced and would have NEVER suspected Malwarebytes would be the root cause of this so it was not on my mind
to uninstall or otherwise deactivate it as a suspect.   
This has resulted in hours upon hours of me pulling my hair out and Windows reinstalls with a few of these systems.   
Such is life, crap happens.   
Agree it's a very serious issue and not "a tiny percentage".  
Unless they consider all the Windows7 users to be a tiny percentage and are factoring in all the FREE product windows10 home users.  
It's an unfortunate situation and has cost me many hours and some travel that I simply cannot bill for. 
It's also been  some billable work for me as well for me.   
All I can say at this point is that I am greatly relieved to have finally got to the bottom of what the hell is going on.   
And yep, to me it seems strange how long it has been going on and has not been fixed for how mainstream of a product with ample staff & all this that is has
not yet been resolved.  
It's really a bummer I didn't find this forum post sooner.  

Steve at Michigan
broadband  

dotcom* 







 

[Porthos]

10 minutes ago, n8lbv said:

It's also been  some billable work for me as well for me.  

I sorta wish I could have had some billable work but as all my clients are win10 no issues here and no freezing calls at all. 

Some were saying that they wish they got an email, 95% of my clients have purchased MB from me (reseller) and Malwarebytes does not have their email on record anywhere. 

[thund3rbolt]

Can we get this resolved once and for all. I have dozens of corporate clients that are complaining about the lockups with no resolution other than disabling features which is NOT an acceptable solution and only leaves my clients unprotected. This has been going on long enough that by now it should have been fixed with an update... and not something that is ongoing for weeks.

 

I'm not saying this in any kind of threatening manner but the fact is we're paying for a product that is fully functional and if that can't be provided that I will have no choice but to recommend a different product to my paying clients.

 

 

[DoTheMath]

Also experiencing this issue on my mother-in-law's ASUS laptop.

Attaching requested logs for your research

mbst-grab-results.zip

[DesertRules]

Both of my Windows 7 desktop systems have been impacted by this issue.  

Attaching diagnostic info files from one of these PCs.  On the other PC, I rolled back the Malwarebytes components package as soon as I stumbled upon this support thread. 

Hope Malwarebytes resolves this issue soon......good luck.

mbst-grab-results.zip

PSList-Output.zip

[exile360]

Thank you for the info/logs.  If you wouldn't mind, could you also grab Support Tool logs from the system you rolled back?  You don't have to reinstall the affected component package, but getting details/logs from both environments/systems could prove helpful in determining the cause for the Developers.

[DesertRules]

Sure -- the attached Support Tool logs + msinfo32 .nfo report file are from my other impacted Window 7 system, captured tonight / post-rollback.  

Both of my Windows 7 systems began hanging frequently in December.  On this system for which logs are attached, I initially I swapped out my older PCIe wifi card and installed a new one, but that didn't fix the hanging issue.  Then I tried removing applications one at a time.  I didn't remove Malwarebytes, though.  I believe the last application I removed from this system was Macrium Reflect.  Then this system then went several days without hanging, but on my other system (logs previously posted), removing Macrium Reflect did not solve the hanging problem.  Then I found this support thread & rolled back just this system.

Let me know if I can provide any other info that might help.  

mbst-grab-results-POST-ROLLBACK.zip

[exile360]

Thanks, hopefully that will help.  It may be that in your case the freezing was being caused by the Ransomware Protection component.  That would fit with Macrium making it worse/more frequent etc. since, at least as I recall from what I know of Macrium Reflect, it performs a lot of filesystem activity in the background to monitor for changes to files/data for its incremental backups and these are precisely the types of operations that the Ransomware Protection module looks at in checking for ransomware activity (file access, creation, modification, deletion etc.).

That's just my hypothesis, but it seems reasonable based on your description.  Either way I'm sure this data will prove helpful so thank you again for providing it and hopefully we will see a fixed release of Malwarebytes soon.

[DesertRules]

Interesting.  Thanks for the info.  

On my other system  -- the first one that is still hanging, for which I posted logs + PSList info upon hanging -- it continued hanging after uninstalling Macrium Reflect, but I wonder if there is still some type of residual interaction with the Ransomware Protection component. 

I'm rolling that system back now.

[exile360]

The issue with Malwarebytes seems to happen on affected systems regardless, but there do appear to be some situations where some configurations/software/hardware can trigger it more frequently/reliably, and I suspect Macrium may be one of those, at least in your case.  Regardless, the freeze will still happen on both systems as long as that build of Malwarebytes is installed unless you determine which module is causing the freezes (Ransomware Protection or Web Protection) and disable it, or of course work around the issue altogether by using the previous version of Malwarebytes as you are now.

[Darkdirk]

12 hours ago, Dave_H said:

I keep thinking about all the people who are experiencing lockups that have no idea what is causing the problem.  Most people may not be experianced enough to figure out it's malwarebytes.  Even I thought it was a hardware problem and wasted several days in that direction.

You really should consider rolling back systems to the previous component package, send out the previous one as a live update.  If your able to send out the "update" to only windows 7 systems, all the better.  If you have to send it out to everyone than do it, if it was good enough a couple months ago it's good enough until you get this all figured out.  You need to think hard about the benefits of the 508 component package verses the negative impact of an unknown number of windows 7 users.

Thats just my honest opinion,

Dave

Yessssss Dave!!!!!!  This one thousand percent!!!

But also... HOW ON EARTH IS THIS STILL GOING ON???   Seriously Malwarebytes,  my trust in you guys is plummeting.  Fast.   I understand that sometimes these things happen with software.  Somehow it slipped through beta testing, OK it happens.  And then it gets reported to you and you can’t replicate the problem.  A little harder to believe, but fine, I guess it’s possible.  But here we are OVER FIVE WEEKS LATER and not only have you not fixed it, but you still barely acknowledge the existence of this bug, and your best fix for it is to have people manually uninstall and install an older version, via a link to BOX DOT COM???  Seriously, you can’t even host the file at Malwarebytes???   And mind you, the only people even privy to this rinky-dink workaround are the ones that were able to seek out this information themselves.  UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!

[SubyTooner]

I've not had one freeze while on my HDD using a Huawei 4g mobile connect with latest MB version and component package. I'm running this now as I type.

HDD has Windows 7 updates up to Aug/2018.

On my SSD it seemed to be related to the ASUS ac-53 as it wouldn't freeze with the Huawei, as I previously mentioned.

Everyone affected should roll back to previous component package. For me all is good on my SSD after the rollback. I did a complete UN-install and install, where license and id keys were needed to activate. Working like a champ...lol.

Def's update just fine and it's not like the previous package is worthless and not doing it's job at detecting WWW crapola.

 

I should've mentioned previously that the first freeze I had on my SSD was straight after a pop up informing me ransomware protection was disabled.

 

I do feel everyone's pain though, being a long time MB (since the start) user, I've seen some crappy updates over the journey. BSOD's being the worst IMO. When your system is OC'd and a software update makes you BLUE SCREEN, that sux big time.

Also seen a lack of Auto updates which was frustrating as well, although this has not happened for a while. Now we get the updates but some you would have rather not received.....lol 

 

May the log GOD's shine upon all those working on this!

MB for life!

  

[bdubrow]

Thank you all for your feedback and continued help in troubleshooting this issue. We totally understand the urgency around this and have had teams working through the weekend to resolve.

We have finally procured a system that is able to reproduce the freeze and now we’re analyzing why it is occurring.  It’s been extraordinarily frustrating for us to not have been able to reproduce this while seeing the reports from the field continue to come in, mainly because we know how frustrated you all are. The fact that this problem only impacts a relatively small number of systems doesn’t help if you have one of those systems or if you're dealing with customers who have this problem.

Rolling back to previous version (as outlined in pinned topic in this forum) continues to be the best option as a work-around for now.

While suggesting that we just push an update to all users (even those not affected by this freeze) to roll back to the earlier version may seem simple, it’s more complicated than you might think. There were other critical fixes in the 1.0.508 update that would impact other users seriously (such as BSOD fixes, etc.). And any update out to the user base has to go through another full round of testing, which takes time and which would be more complex since the update would be have to support being applied over 1.0.508 as well as earlier component packages.  So we are discussing all options, but will move forward with the best one. We also have another release already planned and in the works, so initially we had been hoping to include the fix as part of that upgrade.

Now that we are able to reproduce the issue we are much closer to a fix and determining the best steps forward. 

To everyone helping with logs and system info to try and narrow the cases, we truly appreciate it! To everyone eagerly awaiting resolution, we are treating this as highest priority and we will continue to keep you posted.

[abs7125]

Out of curiosity, what change did you guys make, that allowed you to replicate the freezing?

[Mainer1967]

" I should've mentioned previously that the first freeze I had on my SSD was straight after a pop up informing me ransomware protection was disabled. "

me too - although a false positive - but freezes also at other times.

[exile360]

Hey Becky, thanks for the info.

Have you guys figured out of the freezes caused by Ransomware Protection are connected at all to the freezes caused by Web Protection or are they two completely unrelated issues with similar symptoms?

[bdubrow]

2 hours ago, abs7125 said:

Out of curiosity, what change did you guys make, that allowed you to replicate the freezing?

This involved testing with many, many different Windows 7 systems and hardware configurations in an attempt to get as many commonalities as possible with systems reporting this based on logs provided. We are not able to replicate on demand. With our internal systems there is still an aspect of timing with this, i.e. we need to let a system run for some time before we see the freeze.

1 hour ago, exile360 said:

Have you guys figured out of the freezes caused by Ransomware Protection are connected at all to the freezes caused by Web Protection or are they two completely unrelated issues with similar symptoms?

No, we are still investigating. But right now we are concentrating our efforts on the Web Protection module moreso than Ransomware.

[exile360]

OK, thanks.  Unfortunately this thread is full of users affected by both issues as all of the Windows 7 freeze issues got merged into a single discussion so separating it out for fixing the Ransomware Protection issue may prove problematic.  In fact, I believe most of the recent reports came from users affected by the Ransomware Protection issue, not the Web Protection issue (and I also believe the latter is much more frequently a case of AV web filter conflicts than anything else, though this is not always the case).

[mkaz]

41 minutes ago, bdubrow said:

We are not able to replicate on demand. With our internal systems there is still an aspect of timing with this, i.e. we need to let a system run for some time before we see the freeze.

Has Blizzard.net reported by @tend2it been tested on your test system?  It is one of the few I read where the work "repeatedly" was used.  His posting cites https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20770537321#post-11 where turning off web protection resolved the freeze issue.

 

[mkaz]

Meant to state Battle.net updater not Blizzard.net as tend2it cited.

[Telliege]

Crash happens on any computer running windows 7. It just takes time before it crashes. Even my brother who was not having the issue is now having the issue and found a particular network game that causes it to crash every time. I dont think its hardware related. Seems to be definitely network related though.

[LiquidTension]

23 minutes ago, mkaz said:

Has Blizzard.net reported by @tend2it been tested on your test system?  It is one of the few I read where the work "repeatedly" was used.  His posting cites https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20770537321#post-11 where turning off web protection resolved the freeze issue.

 

Yes, this program in particular has allowed us to reproduce the freeze on an internal system.

[exile360]

I've been able to replicate the freeze with Ransomware Protection on my own Windows 7 system but haven't had a single freeze caused by Web Protection the entire time and I've been running build 508 since the day it was first released on my one and only system which is running Windows 7 x64, fully patched.  I'm not playing any Blizzard games or any of the AV/security products known to conflict with the Web Protection module so that is no doubt a factor as well (and I keep Ransomware Protection disabled and have been pretty much since the feature was first integrated into Malwarebytes 3 which is why I hadn't discovered the freeze on my own system until recently when I tested it by turning it on and allowing it to run for a couple of days until it finally froze).