Spybot S&B 1.5.2 Final: bug + crash with Win98SE

[sbc770]

Hi,

Windows 98SE - P3 500 Mhz - 384 Mo RAM
Spybot S&B 1.5.2 Final release, installed on the top of the previous one (= 1.5.1.19).

* Scan a little longer: 24mn 52 (it was 20mn 48 with the previous version, with the same 112307 items).

* Bug: the item 'Show log' in Teatimer right-click menu, is not working.
It was already broken in version 1.4.

* Crash: if I enable (=register) the SDFiles.dll, and try to open the Spybot-S&D tab in right-click Properties,
I get a crash of Explorer (and need to reboot!).
See screenshot here:

Charles.

[md usa spybot fan]

sbc770 (Charles):

re: the following:

* Bug: the item 'Show log' in Teatimer right-click menu, is not working.
It was already broken in version 1.4.

Can you please elaborate?

Although I run a different OS, right clicking the TeaTimer icon and selecting "Show log" has always worked to me (even in Spybot 1.4). I also do not remember a similar problem being reported before.

Are you getting any messages when you try to do a "Show log"?

Is the Resident.log stored in the usual location on your Windows 98 system?

• C:\Windows\Application Data\Spybot - Search & Destroy\Logs

[md usa spybot fan]

sbc770 (Charles):

One additional question:

When you go into Spybot > Mode > Advanced Mode > Tools > Resident:

Does the Resident.log display properly in the scrollable area at the bottom of the Resident screen?

[sbc770]

Are you getting any messages when you try to do a "Show log"?

Hi md usa spybot fan,

Right-click on Teatimer icon in systray bar -> Show log: nothing happening at all.
Same thing was with v1.4: nothing happening.

Is the Resident.log stored in the usual location on your Windows 98 system?
C:\Windows\Application Data\Spybot - Search & Destroy\Logs

I've got 2 files in
C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Spybot - Search & Destroy\Logs : 'Resident.log' & 'Update downloads.log'

When you go into Spybot > Mode > Advanced Mode > Tools > Resident:
Does the Resident.log display properly in the scrollable area at the bottom of the Resident screen?

Yes, never had problem there.


* By the way, Teatimer 1.5 (all builds) is less stable than in version 1.4, for me.
After a few hours, it can crash, displaying an error message (in a big white window),
but the system go on runing.


Charles

[CadScot]

* By the way, Teatimer 1.5 (all builds) is less stable than in version 1.4, for me.
After a few hours, it can crash, displaying an error message (in a big white window)

I have the same problem here on my Win98SE system. The difference is that I have had the same Big White Box crash happening randomly since V1.4 (and with the Beta of V1.5).

The symptoms are that after a random amount of time (anything from one minute [!] to several hours after booting the PC), TeaTimer displays a large white dialog box in the middle of the screen, containing only a Close button. Clicking the Close button closes TeaTimer and often requires a reboot to get things back to normal.

Sometimes, it seems there is a memory leak because the system claims that there is insufficient memory to run (for example) Explorer (!!!) or any other program. That means a reboot.

My system is an elderly Pentium II/200MHz with 256kb of RAM running Win98SE with all MS patches up until they stopped providing them. The other 'security' products I run are Sygate Personal Firewall and avast! anti-virus Home Edition.

Any help you can give on what is causing this and/or how to stop it would be VERY welcome!
--
BFN
CAD

[sbc770]

Hello CadScot,

same thing for me (except "Sygate Personal Firewall and avast! anti-virus Home Edition" ).

Sometimes, I can also have system claiming that there is insufficient memory to run (even to open metapad!).

Never had such problems with v1.4.

It seems, that Teatimer is crashing more often when I leave the PC alone with no activity,
less often when I am using it.

[CadScot]

All I know is that Sysinternals' Process Explorer reports TeaTimer consuming about 10% CPU (average) when the system is idle (idle, apart from the 15% CPU which ProcExp is consuming to tell me that info.! ).

The only other possibly relevant factor is that my broadband (ADSL) Internet connection is rarely open, and certainly not usually during boot-up time when TeaTimer is inisitalising.

As an experiment, I just tried connecting the Internet during startup and before TeaTimer had loaded, then watching in ProcExp. avast! auto-update did its thing for its usual few minutes (literally!), then TeaTimer—which had been puttering away at around 5–10% CPU throughout—went ballistic and ate 80+% CPU for a minute or so, presumably while it finished initialising. It then settled down to its normal 10% CPU.

I get the increasing feeling that TeaTimer isn't entirely "happy" when there isn't an Internet connection. I've had the dreaded 'empty-white-box-with-a-Close-button' appear within a couple of minutes of TeaTimer initialisation before now! Could there be some TeaTimer-inspired auto-update being attempted and failing in the background?

[… and as I write this post, I discover that TeaTimer has stopped silently (no box this time) and disappeared from the process list—with the 'no memory is available' problem! Time to reboot AGAIN! ]
--
BFN
CAD
(Cad is my name BTW: I had to use CadScot as a moniker here because user IDs need to be 5+ characters long!)

[GreenEyedLady]

CadScot and sbc770 - by any chance does your problem with the "big white box" get postponed by active surfing, then reappear after a specific amount of IDLE time during which there is no internet connection? The weirdness is that UNCONNECTED IDLE time is bad, while internet connection OR heavy cpu activity is not (we normally think risks would run exactly backward from this)?

Is the big white box usually blank except for a single grey button which may be too blank to even have the text "Close" on it? Maybe 5-10% of my cases had a very cryptic incomplete register dump here, but most were too blank to handle any sort of error message.

Your description so far sounds very much like one I used to have several years ago (also on W98SE) and had several discussion threads on. Wish I could post a link to them but unfortunately the old threads were when this forum was on another URL (which no longer exists) and must have been purged rather than carried forward, I can't find them anywhere in the archives here. At the time it was SB1.3 just about to get replaced by a beta 1.4 then later the final 1.4 and the problem seemed to affect all those versions equally.

sbc770 - what AV/firewall are you using?

When the problem struck I would suddenly be unable to open any new apps, and often the open apps would become unresponsive - no matter what I tried to do there wasn't enough memory even after closing everything. About all I could do is reboot to clear it.

I found that the amount of time before the "tombstone" appeared was proportional to the amount of physical memory installed. If you have multiple RAM sticks or different sized sticks to swap around, try removing one or more to see if the time shrinks proportionately, it would be interesting if your problem turns out to be so similar to mine.

On a 350MHZ laptop with 64MB I would get roughly 30 minutes of unconnected idle time between incidents. Maxing out my RAM at 256MB stretched this to about 2 hours. So for CadScot I'll guess that your 200MHZ box will go not quite 4 hours of unconnected idle time before trouble strikes? And for sbc770, at 384MB and 500MHz maybe 1 hour?

FWIW, my problem was only solved by uninstalling ALL remnants of Norton products (disabling it was NOT enough) and replacing NAV2003 with AVG. I had originally thought ZoneAlarm was the culprit but uninstalling that did not fix it until I later uninstalled NAV as well and suddenly the problem stopped. I was even able to reinstall ZA later with no problem thus proving it hadn't been to blame after all. Since I have not gone back to any Norton products I don't know if Spybot 1.5 would now still have the same conflict for me, but it seems plausible that whatever Norton did, might also be mimicked by either Avast or Sygate (I do not have either one).