"Symantec Antivirus Auto-Protect Failed to Load"

[Sheep]

I booted up my laptop this morning, and within 10 seconds of hitting the power button, was slapped with a Blue Screen of Death. When startup repair had finished its work, Windows (Vista, urgh) loaded correctly, but SAV Auto-Protect was not enabled, and all of my virus definitions had been deleted. Not good.

A quick update through the built-in Symantec updater fixed the definitions problem, but now, whenever I try to enable Auto-Protect, it comes on for a few seconds and then becomes disabled again. It's a little baffling.

I typed in a general search about the problem into Google, and was about to click one of the links that came up when it hit me that I was about to navigate to sites unknown completely naked. So, instead of playing Internet Russian Roulette, I decided to come here for some help.

The problem seems to have first manifested while my computer was booting and is logged as "Symantec Antivirus Auto-Protect Failed to Load." After that, the next log is after startup repair had run and simply reports that the virus definitions database was missing.

I'm running Vista Student edition with Symantec Antivirus Home and Student edition. I can't recall any risky browsing or downloads I may have made, though I am running BitTorrent.

Any and all help would be much appreciated.

Edit: Checking through the log of the last scan I did reveals this: "Could not scan 8 files inside C:\Temp\SAV102VistaHomeStudent\SAV102VistaHomeStudent.exe due to extraction errors encountered by the Decomposer Engines." Significant?

[kandrathe]

I booted up my laptop this morning, and within 10 seconds of hitting the power button, was slapped with a Blue Screen of Death. When startup repair had finished its work, Windows (Vista, urgh) loaded correctly, but SAV Auto-Protect was not enabled, and all of my virus definitions had been deleted. Not good.

A quick update through the built-in Symantec updater fixed the definitions problem, but now, whenever I try to enable Auto-Protect, it comes on for a few seconds and then becomes disabled again. It's a little baffling.

I typed in a general search about the problem into Google, and was about to click one of the links that came up when it hit me that I was about to navigate to sites unknown completely naked. So, instead of playing Internet Russian Roulette, I decided to come here for some help.

The problem seems to have first manifested while my computer was booting and is logged as "Symantec Antivirus Auto-Protect Failed to Load." After that, the next log is after startup repair had run and simply reports that the virus definitions database was missing.

I'm running Vista Student edition with Symantec Antivirus Home and Student edition. I can't recall any risky browsing or downloads I may have made, though I am running BitTorrent.

Any and all help would be much appreciated.

Edit: Checking through the log of the last scan I did reveals this: "Could not scan 8 files inside C:\Temp\SAV102VistaHomeStudent\SAV102VistaHomeStudent.exe due to extraction errors encountered by the Decomposer Engines." Significant?

Maybe. Many attacks know how to disable the most popular virus and spyware protections.

I'd install something non-Symantec and free until you re-enable your protection. I use the free version of AVG at home, from Grisoft.

http://free.avg.com/

Here is a link to McAfee forensics tools.

Here is a link to Symantec's web based security and virus scanner.

Then, depending on how savvy, and comfortable you are with your registry and system files, I'd start digging into it off the network. I would go through the registry, hosts file, browser extensions, files, permissions, installed and running programs and services, etc and see if anything has been tampered with.

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[Lissa]

Get something other than Symantec, it really and truly does suck. I'm so pissed at my boss for having it in our corporate network and were constantly getting virii because it just plain sucks. There are a lot of better AVs out there, both pay and free.

Best pay: Kaspersky, Panda

Best Free: Trend, F-prot (IIRC, they're both free, but not 100% sure)

[roguebanshee]

Get something other than Symantec,

One would hope that the issue has been solved by now. Check the post date for the OP.

[DeeBye]

Get something other than Symantec, it really and truly does suck. I'm so pissed at my boss for having it in our corporate network and were constantly getting virii because it just plain sucks. There are a lot of better AVs out there, both pay and free.

Best pay: Kaspersky, Panda

Best Free: Trend, F-prot (IIRC, they're both free, but not 100% sure)

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/ is the new free hotness.

[--Pete]

Hi,

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/ is the new free hotness.

What? The worlds biggest virus producer has an anti-virus product? :lol:

Really, though, I do have some questions:

Can it really be uninstalled, or is it like Norton that completely infects your system?

Can it be set up so that it does *not* run in the background, but can be used to scan files, folders, or the whole system at the user's request?

What are the options for downloading definition files? Is it part of the obnoxious Micro$quish auto update or is there a good updater?

And, of course, the one you can't answer because none of us know -- how soon will MS have a monopoly on AVS and charge greatly overcharge for its use?

Does sound good. But I fear all that comes from <strike>Mordor</strike> Redmond.

--Pete

[roguebanshee]

Can it really be uninstalled, or is it like Norton that completely infects your system?

I installed it briefly yesterday, just to check it out. It seems to have uninstalled correctly.

Can it be set up so that it does *not* run in the background, but can be used to scan files, folders, or the whole system at the user's request?

There were some settings to that effect iirc, but it didn't let you set those things until after installation.

Also worth noting, trying to access the MSSE site in Opera told me that my region wasn't supported. Using IE, I got in just fine. No difference in proxy settings or anything.

Personally, I've been running without a scanner for the last decade at least, and whenever I'm testing a scanner (adware or virus) I come out clean (except some tracker cookies for adware scans). Intelligent browsing is far better security than a background scanner. A proper on-demand scanner may be useful if you're getting a file from a suspicious source, but I wouldn't use MSSE for that.

[DeeBye]

Man, you really hate Microsoft.

What are the options for downloading definition files? Is it part of the obnoxious Micro$quish auto update or is there a good updater?

It updates in the background on its own, or you can manually update it. It's absolutely the least intrusive and least annoying antivirus I've ever used.

[Sir_Die_alot]

A friend of mine had a virus that behaved like you describe. It took some trying (the virus constantly interrupted the install process, but only seemed to stall the FIRST attempt) but AVG once installed found something and cleaned it off and as far as I know my friend's comp hasn't had further trouble.

EDIT: Thread hijack and on the subject of AVG. A question for those of you who use it. I used AVG since Deebye posted about it that year or 4 ago. Until recently I had no complaints, but the newest version would always "click off" (I don't know the proper term for it, not minimize but what happens when you click from one window to another) my current active window. Not a big deal if I was web browsing or something but I play WoW in windowed mode and it was fatal a couple times when suddenly my controls didn't work. Did anyone else have this problem and if you did is it still there?

[DeeBye]

EDIT: Thread hijack and on the subject of AVG. A question for those of you who use it. I used AVG since Deebye posted about it that year or 4 ago. Until recently I had no complaints, but the newest version would always "click off" (I don't know the proper term for it, not minimize but what happens when you click from one window to another) my current active window. Not a big deal if I was web browsing or something but I play WoW in windowed mode and it was fatal a couple times when suddenly my controls didn't work. Did anyone else have this problem and if you did is it still there?

I haven't used AVG for a long time. It used to be really great, but it sucks now. It has lousy detection rates compared to other products, and the feature bloat is stupidly huge.

What you are describing is that AVG likes to take focus when it does even the most mundane of tasks, which is what ultimately turned me off. I want an antivirus utility to work silently, and only tell me something when it needs to. AVG doesn't do this.

Oh AVG, how far you have fallen:(

[Archon_Wing]

Yea, AVG has just gotten totally bloated and useless:(

I use pretty much only Malware Bytes; that handles everything. Super antispyware is ok as well. But then again, with noscript for Firefox, I rarely get anything anyways.

[Sir_Die_alot]

I haven't used AVG for a long time. It used to be really great, but it sucks now. It has lousy detection rates compared to other products, and the feature bloat is stupidly huge.

What you are describing is that AVG likes to take focus when it does even the most mundane of tasks, which is what ultimately turned me off. I want an antivirus utility to work silently, and only tell me something when it needs to. AVG doesn't do this.

Oh AVG, how far you have fallen:(

Ironically this happened when that post about avast was posted a few months back so I switched then. My computer is good enough to multitask but the window thing was a killer.