Immunisation problems with Windows XP

[steve333]

In the last few weeks I have encountered issues with Immunisation on my old P4 XP machine.

Typically it performs the Firefox Immunisations, then a short way into the IE immunisations it goes awry.
The display (animation) may lock up and the Immunisation results list becomes corrupted (showing more items un-immunised than before it started for the subsequent entries).

This seems to be almost certainly a memory management issue / caching problem, I don't suspect malware (no other odd symptoms and clean bill of health when analysing the HD from booted DVD with AntiVir).

I have found that I can get the Immunisations to complete sucessfully if I apply them a couple at a time (rather tediously).

The problem seems to depend on the number of lines of Immunisations being attempted (number of registry keys accessed) not the number of actual Immunisations being applied (data being added to the keys).

It does not seem to affect Firefox Immunisations, which can be applied en-masse.

My best guess is that Windows is cache-ing the Registry edits, and falls over if there are too many applied too quickly.

Waiting between repeated Immunisations seems to help.

Looking at the system memory there was no sign of it running out of free physical memory.

Maybe there is some way SpyBot could force Windows to synchronise / or wait when necessary during the Immunisation process?

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Steve

[spybotsandra]

Hello,

It seems that there is a problem with the compatibility between the immunization of Spybot - Search & Destroy and the Guard of the current Avira Version 10.

Avira will release a fix for this problem, but this "patch" needs to undergo the quality assurance and will probably be released early december.

To avoid the problem temporarely you can do the following:

Click on "Start" (lower left) -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs.
There you click on "Change or Remove Programs", choose Avira, then click on "Remove".
Now deinstall the "Avira Guard" in the wizzard (untick the checkbox).

After immunizing Spybot - S&D you can activate the Avira Guard the same way.
An usual disabling of the Guard in Avira itself does not help.
We hope to solve the problem as fast as possible.

This has also been discussed in our forum:
Incomplete Immunization... (http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=60310)
Possible imunization issue to avira (http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=60232)

Best regards
Sandra
Team Spybot

[steve333]

Thanks Sandra,

For your information the combination of SpyBot and Avira works OK on Vista and Win 7 machines, so I guess it may be related to the "memory leak" issues which are mentioned on Avira's forum.

Our old XP machine just probably doesn't have enough memory to deal with the combination.

I've found that simply applying individual immunistaions one at a time and waiting long enough between each one, is sufficient to give the OS time to sort itself out and avoid crashing most of the time.

Regards,
Steve