Egg On My Face

[neumannu47]

I'm a participant in a weekly computer radio show. A few weeks ago, I unequivocally recommended MBAM with the caveat that I have never tried the real time version. A listener who purchased the program called in today. He said that every time he runs the program on his XP Pro computer, it hard locks. He tried the same on his XP Home computer. Same result.

To the company's credit, they have been trying to work with him to find the cause of the problem, but the responses have been slow in coming. At this point, he has removed the program from his computer. A co-host mentioned that he had researched problems with the real time version, and he recommended against installing it at this point.

What is the status of the lockup problems? (They are discussed in other threads here.) When these problems are resolved, what are the typical solutions that are being found? I was getting ready to purchase 20 licenses for a client, but I'm on hold at the moment. Their computers are all XP Pro, and they REALLY need real time protection.

[exile360]

Greetings. Would it be possible to get a bit more info about the user's systems that are having the issue? First off, do they have ZoneAlarm installed? Second, what database version is loaded and are there any nofications (detections) popping up from MBAM?

[neumannu47]

No, I don't know the caller. He is working with MBAM Tech Support, so they are aware of the issue. My question is, how widespread is the problem?

[exile360]

Well, if it's an issue with freezing and ZoneAlarm or Bitdefender then it's somewhat intermittent. Some people have the problem, and some don't. I heard Bitdefender did a patch that fixed their incompatibility but the developers are still looking into the issue with ZoneAlarm. You can see what's going on with ZoneAlarm here: http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=8095 There was also a recent issue with widespread false positives identifying all processes as Vundo due to modified heuristic detections that was causing lockups, but that was fixed the same day it happened (about a week ago) so updating the definitions would fix that one. There aren't any other issues that I've heard of so far about it freezing but if you do purchase the licenses and have an issue the developers would be more than willing to investigate and with your help try to find a fix, or if you don't want to troubleshoot they would be perfectly willing to refund your purchase. They're really good about customer support around here.

[GT500]

No, I don't know the caller. He is working with MBAM Tech Support, so they are aware of the issue. My question is, how widespread is the problem?

Must be working with Tom, because I don't recall seeing the ticket.

Anyway, the issue is not very wide spread. The only time that I have seen it was when I was testing it running it in VMware on XP Pro. I sent my VM to the guy who designed the protection module, and it didn't freeze for him.

The biggest issue we see with the protection module is that people have purchased it not realizing it was not compatible with 64-bit editions of Windows. We offer those people a refund if they want one.

[neumannu47]

Must be working with Tom, because I don't recall seeing the ticket.

Anyway, the issue is not very wide spread. The only time that I have seen it was when I was testing it running it in VMware on XP Pro. I sent my VM to the guy who designed the protection module, and it didn't freeze for him.

The biggest issue we see with the protection module is that people have purchased it not realizing it was not compatible with 64-bit editions of Windows. We offer those people a refund if they want one.

As I recall, the guy's name is Gene from North Carolina. Since one of his two computers is XP Home, he's not using 64 bit. My guess is that he has something installed on both computers that the protection module doesn't like. Someone asked him to send HJT logs, so maybe you will find the solution there.