Explorer Not Responding and F-Secure Logs to Event Viewer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Charles Law
  • Start date Start date
C

Charles Law

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it boots
it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears to have
frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has been madly
logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of the scanners could
not scan because the definition database was not available at this time;
scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run smoothly,
except that, within a couple of minutes the machine appears to stop working.
I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see that Explorer has stopped
responding. I end task, and things come back to life, and thereafter the
machine runs sweetly, albeit most drivers are not loaded and services are
disabled. [Having said that, I just noticed that Explorer hung again, but I
ended the task and it came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
 
Charles Law said:
I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears to
have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has been
madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of the
scanners could not scan because the definition database was not available
at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."
Click to expand...

I'd probably start by cleaning FSAV off the computer and re-installing it.
I'd also look at http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/downloads/ to see if
there are any upgrades or hotfixes for your version of the scanner. You
don't mention what version of F-Secure AV you're running so I'm assuming you
would want the home support page there.

Not done anything with the home version because I'm a FSAV enterprise
customer / user, but I believe you can disable one of the scanning engines
if you know what one is generating the error, to see if that helps. Don't
forget that the FSAV problems might be a symptom of the problem rather than
the cause - do a chkdsk to check disk health and so on?
 
Hi Robert

Thanks for the reply. I think the F-Secure came as a bundle with Talk Talk
broadband, so I will have to reget the installation files. Worth a try
though.

Cheers

Charles
 
You need to find the specific sub-process or application running under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show Lower
Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage (Highest to
Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the highlight
it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed select:
Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be expanded
to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of the
entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS
 
Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that with
F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much CPU.
Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though. Each time I can
restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is hanging it.

Charles


JS said:
You need to find the specific sub-process or application running under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show Lower
Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage (Highest
to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the highlight
it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of the
entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

Charles Law said:
I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears to
have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has been
madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of the
scanners could not scan because the definition database was not available
at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine appears to
stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see that
Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things come back to
life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit most drivers are
not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said that, I just noticed
that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task and it came back to life
again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process activity
and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same time as
F-Secure?

JS

Charles Law said:
Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that with
F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much CPU.
Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though. Each time I
can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is hanging it.

Charles


JS said:
You need to find the specific sub-process or application running under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show Lower
Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage (Highest
to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of the
entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

Charles Law said:
I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears to
have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has been
madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of the
scanners could not scan because the definition database was not
available at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine appears to
stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see that
Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things come back to
life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit most drivers are
not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said that, I just noticed
that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task and it came back to life
again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
JS said:
Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same time as
F-Secure?
Click to expand...

I can tell you now that the process sucking up all the processor time will
probably be named something like fssm32.exe. There's a hotfix for this exact
issue with the enterprise version of F-Secure on the F-Secure website.

It's also probably set to some paranoid default setting, something like scan
all files and regressively scan all archives... the last setting alone will
totally kill any machine trying to run Java in any serious way, for example,
because all the java JAR class files are.... *drum roll* packed archives!
FSAV is a fine product but the latest version seems to have a few bugs and
some real paranoid settings.
 
Hi Robert

I will definitely check this out. I am close to ditching F-Secure and going
with something free like AVG.

Cheers.

Charles
 
Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are umpteen
things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what they all do.
In order to get some response from the machine I disable them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is my
'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something like
AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and although I
can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in on what is pulling
it down, but this is proving far less straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


JS said:
Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same time as
F-Secure?

JS

Charles Law said:
Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that
with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much CPU.
Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though. Each time I
can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is hanging
it.

Charles


JS said:
You need to find the specific sub-process or application running under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show Lower
Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of the
entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears to
have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has been
madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of the
scanners could not scan because the definition database was not
available at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine appears
to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see that
Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things come back to
life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit most drivers are
not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said that, I just noticed
that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task and it came back to life
again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take another
look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might give you some
help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph for locating what
cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Charles Law said:
Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what they
all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is my
'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something like
AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and although I
can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in on what is
pulling it down, but this is proving far less straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


JS said:
Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same time
as F-Secure?

JS

Charles Law said:
Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that
with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much
CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though. Each
time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is
hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of the
entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears to
have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has been
madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of the
scanners could not scan because the definition database was not
available at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine appears
to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see that
Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things come back to
life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit most drivers are
not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said that, I just
noticed that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task and it came
back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
F-Secure is now completely disabled, and AVG is running. I have run a
complete scan and nothing found.

Process Explorer is also running and I can fairly reliably cause Explorer to
hang. Everything else continues to function, and there is no great CPU
usage. Memory usage is pretty low too.

It seems that it is something to do with Windows Explorer. I open Windows
Explorer and then minimize it. A moment later I try to maximise it and I get
the Explorer frame appear with the desktop inside. I switch to Process
Explorer and it says Explorer "Not responding".

I can look at the threads list but I am not sure what it tells me. There are
about 30 entries called

!CreateSystemThreads

and they all have a state of Wait:UserRequest. When I look at another
machine there are no entries like this.

Does this tell you anything, or is there more information I can get from
this.

Thanks for your continued help.

Charles


JS said:
Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take another
look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might give you some
help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph for locating what
cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Charles Law said:
Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what
they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable
them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is my
'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something like
AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and although
I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in on what is
pulling it down, but this is proving far less straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


JS said:
Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same time
as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that
with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much
CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though. Each
time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is
hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of
the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears
to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has
been madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of
the scanners could not scan because the definition database was not
available at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine appears
to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see
that Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things come
back to life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit most
drivers are not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said that,
I just noticed that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task and it
came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Hi Charles , why not try this http://zabkat.com/x2lite.htm
instead of windows explorer .
I use the paid version , and only ever use windows explorer very
rarely .







F-Secure is now completely disabled, and AVG is running. I have run a
complete scan and nothing found.

Process Explorer is also running and I can fairly reliably cause Explorer to
hang. Everything else continues to function, and there is no great CPU
usage. Memory usage is pretty low too.

It seems that it is something to do with Windows Explorer. I open Windows
Explorer and then minimize it. A moment later I try to maximise it and I get
the Explorer frame appear with the desktop inside. I switch to Process
Explorer and it says Explorer "Not responding".

I can look at the threads list but I am not sure what it tells me. There are
about 30 entries called

!CreateSystemThreads

and they all have a state of Wait:UserRequest. When I look at another
machine there are no entries like this.

Does this tell you anything, or is there more information I can get from
this.

Thanks for your continued help.

Charles


JS said:
Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take another
look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might give you some
help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph for locating what
cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Charles Law said:
Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what
they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable
them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is my
'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something like
AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and although
I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in on what is
pulling it down, but this is proving far less straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same time
as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that
with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much
CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though. Each
time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is
hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of
the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears
to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has
been madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of
the scanners could not scan because the definition database was not
available at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine appears
to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see
that Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things come
back to life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit most
drivers are not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said that,
I just noticed that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task and it
came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Hi

I might well give this a try, but I would really like to get to the bottom
of the problem with Explorer as it could be a symptom of something more
serious.

Thanks.

Charles


Hi Charles , why not try this http://zabkat.com/x2lite.htm
instead of windows explorer .
I use the paid version , and only ever use windows explorer very
rarely .







F-Secure is now completely disabled, and AVG is running. I have run a
complete scan and nothing found.

Process Explorer is also running and I can fairly reliably cause Explorer
to
hang. Everything else continues to function, and there is no great CPU
usage. Memory usage is pretty low too.

It seems that it is something to do with Windows Explorer. I open Windows
Explorer and then minimize it. A moment later I try to maximise it and I
get
the Explorer frame appear with the desktop inside. I switch to Process
Explorer and it says Explorer "Not responding".

I can look at the threads list but I am not sure what it tells me. There
are
about 30 entries called

!CreateSystemThreads

and they all have a state of Wait:UserRequest. When I look at another
machine there are no entries like this.

Does this tell you anything, or is there more information I can get from
this.

Thanks for your continued help.

Charles


JS said:
Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take another
look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might give you
some
help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph for locating
what
cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what
they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable
them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is
my
'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something
like
AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and
although
I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in on what is
pulling it down, but this is proving far less straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same
time
as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that
with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run
any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much
CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though.
Each
time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is
hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running
under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of
the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When
it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears
to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure
has
been madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One
of
the scanners could not scan because the definition database was not
available at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine
appears
to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see
that Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things come
back to life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit most
drivers are not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said
that,
I just noticed that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task and
it
came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
One thing I have just noticed is that when Explorer is running properly, the
symbols in the Process Explorer threads list are shown. That is, there are
entries such as

SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x37a
BROWSEUI.dll!Ordinal138+0x7af5
....

Once Explorer has crashed, the symbols are missing, so entries look like

!Ordinal505+0x37a
!Ordinal138+0x7af5
....

The only entries still to have a symbol are

ntdll.dll!RtlQueueWorkItem+0x2b5
ntdll.dll!RtlDowncaseUnicodeString+0x75
....

I don't know if that helps at all.

Charles




JS said:
Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take another
look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might give you some
help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph for locating what
cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Charles Law said:
Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what
they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable
them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is my
'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something like
AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and although
I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in on what is
pulling it down, but this is proving far less straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


JS said:
Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same time
as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that
with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much
CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though. Each
time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is
hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running under
Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of
the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When it
boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it appears
to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that F-Secure has
been madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event 103 - "One of
the scanners could not scan because the definition database was not
available at this time; scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine appears
to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and I see
that Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things come
back to life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit most
drivers are not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said that,
I just noticed that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task and it
came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Well there certainly is not a lack of articles in MS Knowledge Base on
shlwapi.dll
http://support.microsoft.com/search...=1173&query=SHLWAPI.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

There are four hits when search for both DLL files at the same time:
http://support.microsoft.com/search...ROWSEUI.dll+shlwapi.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

JS


Charles Law said:
One thing I have just noticed is that when Explorer is running properly,
the symbols in the Process Explorer threads list are shown. That is, there
are entries such as

SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x37a
BROWSEUI.dll!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

Once Explorer has crashed, the symbols are missing, so entries look like

!Ordinal505+0x37a
!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

The only entries still to have a symbol are

ntdll.dll!RtlQueueWorkItem+0x2b5
ntdll.dll!RtlDowncaseUnicodeString+0x75
...

I don't know if that helps at all.

Charles




JS said:
Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take another
look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might give you some
help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph for locating what
cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Charles Law said:
Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what
they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable
them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is
my 'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something
like AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and although
I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in on what is
pulling it down, but this is proving far less straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same time
as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that
with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run any
application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much
CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though. Each
time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out what is
hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running
under Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of
the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When
it boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it
appears to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that
F-Secure has been madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event
103 - "One of the scanners could not scan because the definition
database was not available at this time; scanning passed to the next
scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine
appears to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and
I see that Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things
come back to life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit
most drivers are not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said
that, I just noticed that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task
and it came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Thanks, but I just picked these two entries at random. There are many more,
and I have no reason to believe that there is a problem with any of them per
se. I was just illustrating the fact that the symbols vanished when Explorer
crashed.

Charles


JS said:
Well there certainly is not a lack of articles in MS Knowledge Base on
shlwapi.dll
http://support.microsoft.com/search...=1173&query=SHLWAPI.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

There are four hits when search for both DLL files at the same time:
http://support.microsoft.com/search...ROWSEUI.dll+shlwapi.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

JS


Charles Law said:
One thing I have just noticed is that when Explorer is running properly,
the symbols in the Process Explorer threads list are shown. That is,
there are entries such as

SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x37a
BROWSEUI.dll!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

Once Explorer has crashed, the symbols are missing, so entries look like

!Ordinal505+0x37a
!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

The only entries still to have a symbol are

ntdll.dll!RtlQueueWorkItem+0x2b5
ntdll.dll!RtlDowncaseUnicodeString+0x75
...

I don't know if that helps at all.

Charles




JS said:
Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take another
look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might give you
some help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph for
locating what cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what
they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable
them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is
my 'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something
like AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and
although I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in on
what is pulling it down, but this is proving far less straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same
time as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is that
with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot run
any application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much
CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though.
Each time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out
what is hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running
under Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of
the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When
it boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it
appears to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that
F-Secure has been madly logging to the Application Event Log: Event
103 - "One of the scanners could not scan because the definition
database was not available at this time; scanning passed to the
next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure Gatekeeper,
reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine
appears to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager and
I see that Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and things
come back to life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly, albeit
most drivers are not loaded and services are disabled. [Having said
that, I just noticed that Explorer hung again, but I ended the task
and it came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Did you recently install IE7 by any chance?

JS

Charles Law said:
Thanks, but I just picked these two entries at random. There are many
more, and I have no reason to believe that there is a problem with any of
them per se. I was just illustrating the fact that the symbols vanished
when Explorer crashed.

Charles


JS said:
Well there certainly is not a lack of articles in MS Knowledge Base on
shlwapi.dll
http://support.microsoft.com/search...=1173&query=SHLWAPI.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

There are four hits when search for both DLL files at the same time:
http://support.microsoft.com/search...ROWSEUI.dll+shlwapi.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

JS


Charles Law said:
One thing I have just noticed is that when Explorer is running properly,
the symbols in the Process Explorer threads list are shown. That is,
there are entries such as

SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x37a
BROWSEUI.dll!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

Once Explorer has crashed, the symbols are missing, so entries look like

!Ordinal505+0x37a
!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

The only entries still to have a symbol are

ntdll.dll!RtlQueueWorkItem+0x2b5
ntdll.dll!RtlDowncaseUnicodeString+0x75
...

I don't know if that helps at all.

Charles




Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take
another look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might
give you some help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph
for locating what cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what
they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable
them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure is
my 'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with something
like AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and
although I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in
on what is pulling it down, but this is proving far less
straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same
time as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is
that with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot
run any application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using much
CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang though.
Each time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't find out
what is hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running
under Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed
select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more detailed
'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to be
expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of
the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus. When
it boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that it
appears to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see that
F-Secure has been madly logging to the Application Event Log:
Event 103 - "One of the scanners could not scan because the
definition database was not available at this time; scanning
passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure
Gatekeeper, reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that
is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine
appears to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager
and I see that Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and
things come back to life, and thereafter the machine runs sweetly,
albeit most drivers are not loaded and services are disabled.
[Having said that, I just noticed that Explorer hung again, but I
ended the task and it came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Unfortunately I don't have that information as I am trying to fix this for a
friend, and auto-updates are enabled, so they probably wouldn't know either.
Is there a particular issue that you are thinking of?

Charles


JS said:
Did you recently install IE7 by any chance?

JS

Charles Law said:
Thanks, but I just picked these two entries at random. There are many
more, and I have no reason to believe that there is a problem with any of
them per se. I was just illustrating the fact that the symbols vanished
when Explorer crashed.

Charles


JS said:
Well there certainly is not a lack of articles in MS Knowledge Base on
shlwapi.dll
http://support.microsoft.com/search...=1173&query=SHLWAPI.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

There are four hits when search for both DLL files at the same time:
http://support.microsoft.com/search...ROWSEUI.dll+shlwapi.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

JS


One thing I have just noticed is that when Explorer is running
properly, the symbols in the Process Explorer threads list are shown.
That is, there are entries such as

SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x37a
BROWSEUI.dll!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

Once Explorer has crashed, the symbols are missing, so entries look
like

!Ordinal505+0x37a
!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

The only entries still to have a symbol are

ntdll.dll!RtlQueueWorkItem+0x2b5
ntdll.dll!RtlDowncaseUnicodeString+0x75
...

I don't know if that helps at all.

Charles




Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take
another look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might
give you some help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph
for locating what cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue what
they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I disable
them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure
is my 'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with
something like AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and
although I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in
on what is pulling it down, but this is proving far less
straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same
time as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is
that with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I cannot
run any application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using
much CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang
though. Each time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't
find out what is hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running
under Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show
Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU
usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options
listed select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more
detailed 'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to
be expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left
of the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus.
When it boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that
it appears to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see
that F-Secure has been madly logging to the Application Event
Log: Event 103 - "One of the scanners could not scan because the
definition database was not available at this time; scanning
passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure
Gatekeeper, reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that
is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to run
smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the machine
appears to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task Manager
and I see that Explorer has stopped responding. I end task, and
things come back to life, and thereafter the machine runs
sweetly, albeit most drivers are not loaded and services are
disabled. [Having said that, I just noticed that Explorer hung
again, but I ended the task and it came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
None specific, but a number of systems have had problems with IE7, but since
auto-updates is enabled IE7 was most likely installed some time ago.

JS

Charles Law said:
Unfortunately I don't have that information as I am trying to fix this for
a friend, and auto-updates are enabled, so they probably wouldn't know
either. Is there a particular issue that you are thinking of?

Charles


JS said:
Did you recently install IE7 by any chance?

JS

Charles Law said:
Thanks, but I just picked these two entries at random. There are many
more, and I have no reason to believe that there is a problem with any
of them per se. I was just illustrating the fact that the symbols
vanished when Explorer crashed.

Charles


Well there certainly is not a lack of articles in MS Knowledge Base on
shlwapi.dll
http://support.microsoft.com/search...=1173&query=SHLWAPI.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

There are four hits when search for both DLL files at the same time:
http://support.microsoft.com/search...ROWSEUI.dll+shlwapi.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

JS


One thing I have just noticed is that when Explorer is running
properly, the symbols in the Process Explorer threads list are shown.
That is, there are entries such as

SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x37a
BROWSEUI.dll!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

Once Explorer has crashed, the symbols are missing, so entries look
like

!Ordinal505+0x37a
!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

The only entries still to have a symbol are

ntdll.dll!RtlQueueWorkItem+0x2b5
ntdll.dll!RtlDowncaseUnicodeString+0x75
...

I don't know if that helps at all.

Charles




Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take
another look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might
give you some help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the graph
for locating what cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There are
umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a clue
what they all do. In order to get some response from the machine I
disable them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure
is my 'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with
something like AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and
although I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home in
on what is pulling it down, but this is proving far less
straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and process
activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same
time as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is
that with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I
cannot run any application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using
much CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang
though. Each time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't
find out what is hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running
under Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and
'Show Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU
usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options
listed select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more
detailed 'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to
be expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left
of the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus.
When it boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly that
it appears to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can see
that F-Secure has been madly logging to the Application Event
Log: Event 103 - "One of the scanners could not scan because the
definition database was not available at this time; scanning
passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure
Gatekeeper, reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever that
is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to
run smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the
machine appears to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task
Manager and I see that Explorer has stopped responding. I end
task, and things come back to life, and thereafter the machine
runs sweetly, albeit most drivers are not loaded and services
are disabled. [Having said that, I just noticed that Explorer
hung again, but I ended the task and it came back to life again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Agreed.

Charles


JS said:
None specific, but a number of systems have had problems with IE7, but
since auto-updates is enabled IE7 was most likely installed some time ago.

JS

Charles Law said:
Unfortunately I don't have that information as I am trying to fix this
for a friend, and auto-updates are enabled, so they probably wouldn't
know either. Is there a particular issue that you are thinking of?

Charles


JS said:
Did you recently install IE7 by any chance?

JS

Thanks, but I just picked these two entries at random. There are many
more, and I have no reason to believe that there is a problem with any
of them per se. I was just illustrating the fact that the symbols
vanished when Explorer crashed.

Charles


Well there certainly is not a lack of articles in MS Knowledge Base on
shlwapi.dll
http://support.microsoft.com/search...=1173&query=SHLWAPI.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

There are four hits when search for both DLL files at the same time:
http://support.microsoft.com/search...ROWSEUI.dll+shlwapi.dll&adv=&mode=s&cat=False

JS


One thing I have just noticed is that when Explorer is running
properly, the symbols in the Process Explorer threads list are shown.
That is, there are entries such as

SHLWAPI.dll!Ordinal505+0x37a
BROWSEUI.dll!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

Once Explorer has crashed, the symbols are missing, so entries look
like

!Ordinal505+0x37a
!Ordinal138+0x7af5
...

The only entries still to have a symbol are

ntdll.dll!RtlQueueWorkItem+0x2b5
ntdll.dll!RtlDowncaseUnicodeString+0x75
...

I don't know if that helps at all.

Charles




Once you have removed 'All traces' of F-Secure then I would take
another look using Process Explorer. The CPU graph at the top might
give you some help (move the mouse cursor over any spike in the
graph for locating what cause the CPU usage spike).

JS

Hard to say. It's not a product I am really familiar with. There
are umpteen things that get loaded at start-up, and I haven't a
clue what they all do. In order to get some response from the
machine I disable them all.

I've got to the point now where I am fairly satisfied that F-Secure
is my 'slow-down' problem, so I might well ditch it and go with
something like AVG.

What is now more worrying is that Explorer hangs regularly, and
although I can restart it I can't go on like this. I need to home
in on what is pulling it down, but this is proving far less
straightforward.

Do you have any techniques that would be useful here?

Thanks.

Charles


Does F-secure have a background task that monitors disk and
process activity and if so could this slow the PC down?
Also do you have any other AV/Spyware software running at the same
time as F-Secure?

JS

Hi JS

Thanks for replying. I have Process Explorer, but one problem is
that with F-Secure enabled the machine runs so slowly that I
cannot run any application, not even Process Explorer.

When I disable F-Secure I can run PE but there is nothing using
much CPU. Idle is around 85-90%. I still get the Explorer hang
though. Each time I can restart it with Task Manager, but I can't
find out what is hanging it.

Charles


You need to find the specific sub-process or application running
under Explorer that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and
'Show Lower Pane' options.
Then expand the process named 'Explorer' (click on the + sign)
In the column on the left named 'CPU', look for any high CPU
usage.
Next click on the CPU column to sort the processes by %CPU usage
(Highest to Lowest).
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU % the
highlight it,
Now that it's highlighted, right click and from the options
listed select: Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that
process.
You can also double click on any process to open up a more
detailed 'Properties' window.

Note: some entries like Explorer and System/Services may need to
be expanded to show the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left
of the entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

I know this is going to be a long shot, but any pointers greatly
received.

I have a Windows XP Home machine running F-Secure anti-virus.
When it boots it logs in to Windows and then runs so slowly
that it appears to have frozen. If I boot into Safe Mode I can
see that F-Secure has been madly logging to the Application
Event Log: Event 103 - "One of the scanners could not scan
because the definition database was not available at this time;
scanning passed to the next scanner."

I have Googled for this but no helpful hits.

The System Event Log also contains events from F-Secure
Gatekeeper, reporting a problem with TNBUtil.exe (what ever
that is).

I restart in Diagnostic Mode using MSConfig, and all seems to
run smoothly, except that, within a couple of minutes the
machine appears to stop working. I can Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Task
Manager and I see that Explorer has stopped responding. I end
task, and things come back to life, and thereafter the machine
runs sweetly, albeit most drivers are not loaded and services
are disabled. [Having said that, I just noticed that Explorer
hung again, but I ended the task and it came back to life
again]

Can anyone suggest a way to get to the bottom of this?

TIA

Charles
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
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