Threk
2008-03-13, 22:43
Last Night I was running some scans to clean up an infected computer. The last I planned to run were ClamWin and Spybot. Since it was getting late I (foolishly) started them both just before I went to sleep.
When I woke up ClamWin was 95% done and had found at least 1 trojan(others might have scrolled off the log window), and Spybot had found a couple disabled windows security settings(Nothing else).
I clicked "Fix Selected Problems" and immediately the system bogged down. Spybot and Clamwin were fighting for every CPU cycle they could get. Eventually I managed to get task manager running, and tried to kill Spybot. It wouldn't die. The system is now sooo slow that I would literally move the mouse and then count to 10 waiting for the pointer to move. If I type something it's usually 1-2 MINUTES before what I type shows up, but I really didn't want to re-start an 8 hour Clamwin scan to get that trojan. So I tried copying Process Explorer onto the machine to see if it could kill Spybot(It couldn't, and neither could pskill, or taskkill) at this point I realized that I'd wasted 4 hours and it would be faster to just run the scan again, so I tried to shutdown (waste of time) and finally just unplugged the computer.
I can understand why you want to make Spybot Unkillable (so malware can't just stop it), but if you're going to have it attempt something repeatedly we really need either a cancel option or a timeout, so it doesn't lock a machine up and force us to use drastic measures to shut down. I'd prefer it just failed to fix something over locking a machine up.
When I woke up ClamWin was 95% done and had found at least 1 trojan(others might have scrolled off the log window), and Spybot had found a couple disabled windows security settings(Nothing else).
I clicked "Fix Selected Problems" and immediately the system bogged down. Spybot and Clamwin were fighting for every CPU cycle they could get. Eventually I managed to get task manager running, and tried to kill Spybot. It wouldn't die. The system is now sooo slow that I would literally move the mouse and then count to 10 waiting for the pointer to move. If I type something it's usually 1-2 MINUTES before what I type shows up, but I really didn't want to re-start an 8 hour Clamwin scan to get that trojan. So I tried copying Process Explorer onto the machine to see if it could kill Spybot(It couldn't, and neither could pskill, or taskkill) at this point I realized that I'd wasted 4 hours and it would be faster to just run the scan again, so I tried to shutdown (waste of time) and finally just unplugged the computer.
I can understand why you want to make Spybot Unkillable (so malware can't just stop it), but if you're going to have it attempt something repeatedly we really need either a cancel option or a timeout, so it doesn't lock a machine up and force us to use drastic measures to shut down. I'd prefer it just failed to fix something over locking a machine up.