Windows 7 + VIRUS SCANNER = Crap

[Tunnelcat]

Dammit! Happened today after behaving itself for quite a while. The "temporary account bug" reared it's ugly head yet again. The event log pointed to MSE as being the culprit hanger upon shutdown a few days ago. And this time, it wasn't really a temporary account, but a really weird appearing mishmash desktop that was partially mine with my usual wallpaper, but using what looked like old Windows XP borders and icons. Microsoft stuff can't even play nice with itself!

[Sirius]

It's not the first one I've heard of by a long shot
Unfortunately there are so many products it can be difficult to check the interactions for each one, especially when infrequently-used features are involved. If we're lucky, someone catches those in Beta, but it doesn't always work that way.

Then there were products like WHS 2011, which just weren't reliable any way you sliced it.

[Foil]

I've heard that about WHS 2011, but mine has been running quite reliably for a year or so now. Does everything I want (mostly just backups and media-sharing and web hosting), hasn't ever crashed on me, and saved my butt at least once by restoring a machine I broke.

[Tunnelcat]

What frosts me is that only my gaming rig that came with the bare OS (Windows 7 Professional) and NO CRAPWARE has had this problem with some program not unhooking itself properly from the registry during shutdown and causing the temp account BS the next time it boots. My other 2 Win 7 computers have never done this, ever, and they're loaded with HP crapware to the gills. I'd really like to figure out a solution, other than having to get out of the car and go around 3 times, ie., reboot, when it occurs.

[Krom]

Buy a SSD for the system, reinstall windows on that (do not clone the old drive or use a recovery disk, you must actually install windows on the SSD from the windows DVD, and don't partition or format the drive ahead of time either, let windows setup do it). Just attach the old HDD as a secondary drive and use it for storage and for video games (which hardly benefit from being on a SSD). Between the fresh install and the SSD, it should cure it.

Just make sure your hard drive controllers are in AHCI mode instead of IDE mode (they should be in AHCI mode even if you are booting from a mechanical drive, and keep in mind the mode cannot be easily switched once windows is installed).

[Tunnelcat]

SSD's are down in price now, so that might be a pretty good option. Reinstalling Windows would be a royal pain though. I have SP1 on disk, but every update after that would have to be downloaded on my snails pace DSL. Not an enticing option. Maybe if Microsoft comes out with SP2 on disk soon, I'll do the switch and just put up with the temp account problem for now.

Out of curiosity Krom, why would doing this solve the problem? It's not a problem on the other 2 systems that have standard hard drives.

[Sirius]

Foil: It's fine once you get it working, yeah... it's getting it working in the first place that caused me grief. Connector would fail to install for arcane reasons, the remote access thing would forget to reset the UPnP ports on the router every so often (I eventually gave up and did it manually), etc etc. I still have the music player thingy tell me tracks don't exist/couldn't be opened when there's nothing wrong with them and they haven't changed recently.

[Krom]

SSD's are down in price now, so that might be a pretty good option. Reinstalling Windows would be a royal pain though. I have SP1 on disk, but every update after that would have to be downloaded on my snails pace DSL. Not an enticing option. Maybe if Microsoft comes out with SP2 on disk soon, I'll do the switch and just put up with the temp account problem for now.

Out of curiosity Krom, why would doing this solve the problem? It's not a problem on the other 2 systems that have standard hard drives.

It's not a problem I've seen or heard of on any other machine either, so odds are something is improperly configured or damaged in the windows install and a fresh install would correct it, especially if it is something that is happening semi-frequently. The SSD is just a recommendation because if someone is going to format and reinstall anyway, might as well make it that much more worth their while by boosting the system up with a SSD.

As for the updates taking forever on a slow DSL...well, I still remember the dialup days, so I can't complain about any flavor of high speed. And there are often workarounds: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/maikkost ... -wsus.aspx

[Foil]

I've heard that about WHS 2011, but mine has been running quite reliably for a year or so now. Does everything I want (mostly just backups and media-sharing and web hosting), hasn't ever crashed on me, and saved my butt at least once by restoring a machine I broke.

Foil: It's fine once you get it working, yeah... it's getting it working in the first place that caused me grief. Connector would fail to install for arcane reasons, the remote access thing would forget to reset the UPnP ports on the router every so often (I eventually gave up and did it manually), etc etc. I still have the music player thingy tell me tracks don't exist/couldn't be opened when there's nothing wrong with them and they haven't changed recently.

Ah, yeah, the PnP thing. That was pretty badly broken in WHS v1 as well, so I just set the ports manually and disabled PnP on the router a long time ago.

Any idea what's causing the music-player issue? I don't actually use that (I just have a local player pull from the homserver's library).

[Tunnelcat]

SSD's are down in price now, so that might be a pretty good option. Reinstalling Windows would be a royal pain though. I have SP1 on disk, but every update after that would have to be downloaded on my snails pace DSL. Not an enticing option. Maybe if Microsoft comes out with SP2 on disk soon, I'll do the switch and just put up with the temp account problem for now.

Out of curiosity Krom, why would doing this solve the problem? It's not a problem on the other 2 systems that have standard hard drives.

It's not a problem I've seen or heard of on any other machine either, so odds are something is improperly configured or damaged in the windows install and a fresh install would correct it, especially if it is something that is happening semi-frequently. The SSD is just a recommendation because if someone is going to format and reinstall anyway, might as well make it that much more worth their while by boosting the system up with a SSD.

As for the updates taking forever on a slow DSL...well, I still remember the dialup days, so I can't complain about any flavor of high speed. And there are often workarounds: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/maikkost ... -wsus.aspx

Oh, apparently this is a common bug. You're just lucky that it hasn't happened to you. It will even happen to a clean install of the OS and switching between accounts. It also showed up with Vista as well, so it has something to do with the new platform. After searching the web and looking at my own event logs, I believe this is what is happening:

If windows is updating, or if you have applications which are autoupdating, you need to cancel the application thats updating before logging out. If you just log out, or reboot, you're uncleanly unmounting the registry. Look in your system and application logs, and you'll see the message "your registry was not cleanly dismounted" This will corrupt a profile.

In my most recent case, it was MSE apparently doing something in the background. I'd installed the latest definition updates right before shutdown, so MSE must have still been working. I've also caught lsass.exe not unhooking properly from the registry as well.

What a user has to do to avoid corrupting their user profile permanently is to reboot without doing ANYTHING AT ALL in the temp account. Reboot fast before some program goes out on the net too. It appears that once a change has been made, the user's account profile will be corrupted and require some registry work to fix the problem.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 9be?page=3

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 948a4c7a8b

However, I do like the idea of the OS on an SSD, so I'm seriously considering doing that since they are cheaper now.

[Krom]

Like I said, I've seen Windows 7 (and Vista) running on a large variety of machines from powerful desktops, to slow 5400 RPM hard drive encumbered laptops with anemic amounts of memory and I've never encountered that issue on any of them. The only time I have seen temporary account glitches was from Windows logging into domains with roaming profiles, which was never that solid to begin with.

What exactly is the hardware (CPU, RAM, HDD, GPU, motherboard/chipset if available) in the system and what sorts of software do you have automatically launching and running in the background on it?

[Sirius]

Any idea what's causing the music-player issue? I don't actually use that (I just have a local player pull from the homserver's library).

Nothing I've been able to figure out. It just said that it was unable to open files (usually several in a row) at the time, and looking back over the event logs there's nothing really informative; there are a few errors that may be related (ASP.NET application pool exceptions that contain HRESULTs that translate to one of ERROR_OPERATION_ABORTED or ERROR_NETNAME_DELETED - but at least one of those probably means I hit the "stop" button at the remote end), but nothing that helps me diagnose them.

IIS logs show pretty much nothing of interest at all.

This doesn't surprise me because WHS sort of reeks of cut corners; the web access thing feels a little slapped-on in how it works (we can do better than a Flash/Silverlight player, surely? Why not hook into that WMP feature that lets you do remote streaming?). That the diagnostics aren't particularly great seems to follow, considering how few people are likely to try digging through them anyway.

This is usually the point I start doing internet searches for people with similar issues but I'm already tired

P.S. Luckily it's not this: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wik ... Web_Access
How do you like that workaround?

[Tunnelcat]

Like I said, I've seen Windows 7 (and Vista) running on a large variety of machines from powerful desktops, to slow 5400 RPM hard drive encumbered laptops with anemic amounts of memory and I've never encountered that issue on any of them. The only time I have seen temporary account glitches was from Windows logging into domains with roaming profiles, which was never that solid to begin with.

What exactly is the hardware (CPU, RAM, HDD, GPU, motherboard/chipset if available) in the system and what sorts of software do you have automatically launching and running in the background on it?

I've got two 1.5 terabyte 6Gbit/s SATA 7200 Western Digital drives, an EVGA GTX 480, an ASUS Rampage GENE motherboard with an Intel i7 Quad Core (can't remember the chipset, but it was made right before Intel's Sandy Bridge version came out) and 12 G's of 1333 ram, so I'm not really short on performance. Other than the usual Windows Services, EVGA Precision, my mouse R.A.T. profiler and MSE, there's not much else that I know of automatically set to run. I did get rid of ASUS Suite II because it was known to have a memory leak, but that was a long time ago. All I used it for was the fan speed controller. I just set all my case and CPU fans to full speed in the BIOS anyway, since my case is small and tends to heat up with slow speed fans. Haven't had any overheating problems at all and nothing is overclocked either. I also keep the insides of the case clean. I could go to BlackViper.com and see what else needs to be pruned in services I guess. I even disabled Media Center.

Hadn't thought about about roaming profiles. How do I know if my user profile is set that way and how can I change it? I haven't mucked around in Group Policy at all since the system was set up because I'm not very familiar with the settings.

[Krom]

Yeah, it sounds plenty powerful since I've never seen Windows Vista or 7 behave that way even on my old core 2 duo system. Although the two hard drives, are those in any type of RAID or are they just single drives?

Also if the HDDs are just attached as single drives (or dynamic disks) are the HDD controllers in AHCI mode or in IDE mode? An easy way to tell is to just open the AS SSD benchmark: link, the info on the left side of its window can tell you what driver your HDD controllers are using (look for msahci or iaStor).

[Tunnelcat]

They are 2 single drives, not in a RAID configuration. I'll need to check on the mode type tomorrow. What about how I check if I have a roaming user profile?

[Krom]

Roaming profiles can only happen when the machine is logging in to a (corporate) domain, pretty much nobody does that at home because it requires a server machine always on that is running some recent version of windows server. If you have to check, you aren't using a roaming profile.

[Foil]

P.S. Luckily [my WHS 2011 issue] is not this: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wik ... Web_Access
How do you like that workaround?

LOL, "oops, we're not handling timeouts well here, but it's not going to be fixed, so uh... just remove some files", that's hilarious.

[Tunnelcat]

OK Krom. I finally got into the BIOS on my gaming rig. The idiots who built it must have thought I would want RAID in the future, so they installed the Marvel Chipset Controller, which only supports IDE, instead of using the Intel Controller, which DOES support AHCI. So my 2, SATA 6 Gbit/s non-RAID drives are running in IDE mode. To really clean things up, I would have to set AHCI in the BIOS, NOT install the Marvel Controller and then install Windows fresh. I'd definitely have to do this if I wanted to install an SSD. I've been reading that if the user were to switch to AHCI in the BIOS, the user wouldn't be able to boot into Windows. Groan!

[flip]

I wouldn't hook any drives into the marvell controller.

[Krom]

Tunnelcat: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
Apply that registry change, and you can move your primary hard drive over to the Intel controller and switch on AHCI mode without having to reinstall or repair install windows 7.

[Tunnelcat]

OK, I need a little more info here. My 2 drives are hooked up to the only 2 high speed SATA 6Gbit/s connections on the motherboard at the moment. Do I leave the primary drive connected there and do the registry change before I set AHCI mode in the BIOS, or do I need to switch to some other connector on the motherboard first? Should I do the same thing for the secondary drive as the primary, or leave it alone? It's also set to IDE mode right now. All my games are on the secondary drive by the way.

And should I uninstall the Marvel Driver or leave it alone? It does have an uninstall option in the start menu. Doesn't sound like it's worth much if I'm not using a RAID configuration. I still have the original motherboard installation disk if I ever need the software again anyway.

[Krom]

It doesn't matter for the secondary drives, they will work fine either way.

The proper order is to do the registry change first, then shut down and move your drives to the Intel controller channels. Then go into BIOS and change them all to AHCI mode, after that you should be able to boot normally.

[Tunnelcat]

Well, I've got to do the regular clean-out-the-case job sometime, so moving the cables to the other channels will be part of the process. What kind of performance changes will I see in AHCI mode?

[Krom]

Quite some time ago I actually went through the effort to get Windows XP into AHCI mode during a hard drive upgrade (normally XP only supports IDE mode). The result was XP booted about 30% faster, so quickly that a number of automatically launching system tray applications would fail to show their icons because the applications would start before the system tray, and to fix it I had to turn off automatic login just to slow down the start up sequence and allow everything to load in the proper order.

It also corrected another very annoying issue that IDE mode left wide open: Say I was burning some files to a DVD, and at the same time I would want to listen to some music or something. If I pushed play on my media player, even if I was playing files that were on an entirely separate drive, the DVD burn would have to stall just so the computer could write a single tiny change to the windows registry. You would press play and then watch as the hard drive literally froze up and did nothing till the DVD burner ran out of buffered data and stopped the burn, then the computer would finally write the one bit it needed to write, then it would resume sending data to the DVD burner so it could resume the burn. Once I turned on AHCI mode that problem went away permanently, while burning files I could press play on a media player and the hard drive would take care of the write and keep supplying data to the DVD burner both at the same time.

Your mileage may vary, but AHCI enables some features on most hard drives made within the last 5 years that can tremendously improve multitasking performance on the machine.

[Tunnelcat]

Hey Krom, how much of a boost will I get doing the switch? I know that going from the Marvell controller with it's one-lane pipe should improve transfer speeds, but wouldn't the SATA 6Gb/s still be a little better, or at least comparable to, the Intel controller's SATA 3 Gb/s for just a regular mechanical HDD? I know that an SSD would definitely benefit from the switch, but I don't have one right now.

Something else I noticed when I was perusing the motherboard manual. Supposedly, the Marvell 9128 controller can be set to AHCI. But again, with Marvell's one lane, I gather it wouldn't gain me much. It just seems like a waste that ASUS put in 2 SATA 6Gb/s ports and then hobble them with that crappy Marvell controller.

[Krom]

No, the 6 gbps ports will not be any faster than a 3 gbps port when using mechanical disks. You have to keep in mind that the fastest 7200 RPM hard drives available right now max out at ~125 MB/sec sequential speed, which isn't even fast enough to saturate a first generation 1.5 gbps SATA connection (can reach about 140 MB/sec), hard drives simply aren't that fast. It doesn't matter how fast the SATA port is, the hard drive is the limiting factor. Having a common 7200 RPM mechanical hard drive on a SATA 6.0 gbps connection is like riding a moped on a formula one race track, it doesn't matter how fast the track was designed to be driven: your top speed is 30 MPH.

[Tunnelcat]

Yeah, that's what I figured, at least with my mechanical drives. But if I install an SSD as the OS drive, the Marvell controller still sounds like it's the bottleneck. I've also found that the 9128 version doesn't support TRIM either, so it would be much smarter to ditch the Marvell controller all together. Either that or get a newer motherboard. Not in the cards right now.

[Glowhyena]

I've not had any issue with Win 7. Vista sucks badly.

Same, except Vista.

I'm using Windows 7 Professional 64-bit OEM, Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes (Paid), and Spybot.

[Krom]

Yeah, that's what I figured, at least with my mechanical drives. But if I install an SSD as the OS drive, the Marvell controller still sounds like it's the bottleneck. I've also found that the 9128 version doesn't support TRIM either, so it would be much smarter to ditch the Marvell controller all together. Either that or get a newer motherboard. Not in the cards right now.

Even with a 6 gbps SSD, the disadvantages of using the marvel controller would probably cancel out any performance benefits it may have over the native ports (at least for an OS drive because of the lack of TRIM, they should work fine for a secondary storage only drive). And for SSDs the real benefit is the much shorter access latency which doesn't really care about the port bandwidth, so a SSD on a 3.0 gbps port is still going to be upwards of hundreds of times faster than a mechanical HDD on a 6.0 gbps port.

[Tunnelcat]

Thanks Krom. I think I'm going to go shopping for an SSD. They're down in price now and I can use the old OS drive as a third storage drive.

[Tunnelcat]

Yeah, that's what I figured, at least with my mechanical drives. But if I install an SSD as the OS drive, the Marvell controller still sounds like it's the bottleneck. I've also found that the 9128 version doesn't support TRIM either, so it would be much smarter to ditch the Marvell controller all together. Either that or get a newer motherboard. Not in the cards right now.

Even with a 6 gbps SSD, the disadvantages of using the marvel controller would probably cancel out any performance benefits it may have over the native ports (at least for an OS drive because of the lack of TRIM, they should work fine for a secondary storage only drive). And for SSDs the real benefit is the much shorter access latency which doesn't really care about the port bandwidth, so a SSD on a 3.0 gbps port is still going to be upwards of hundreds of times faster than a mechanical HDD on a 6.0 gbps port.

Krom, when I get an SSD, I'd like to move my OS installation to that and then use both my mechanical drives for storage and games. One drive is a game drive right now and I'd like to put more games on the old OS drive too. What's the best procedure to move my Windows 7 64 Professional OS to the SSD?

Should I also switch both my mechanical drives to the 3 gpbs Intel ports along with the new SSD? They're still on the Marvell 6 gpbs ports at the moment. And do I, or should I, uninstall the Marvell controller when I switch to the Intel ports?

[Krom]

Unless the SSD is bigger than the boot partition on your current OS drive, I'd give up on trying to clone it.

And honestly if it was my machine, I'd just do a new windows install on the SSD. There are a few things that windows does differently when it is on a hard drive (like automatically scheduled defrags, and no TRIM) that I wouldn't want persisting after the switch and the best way to be sure is to run a fresh instal. Just pull the other drives from the system, install windows on the SSD, then plug the other drives back in and you will be able to quickly copy most data manually. I actually have my OS/data from when I was on a mechanical still on the drive sitting on my shelf, if I put it back in the machine it'd boot right up (and immediately complain about needing about 50 updates).

[TigerRaptor]

I've not had any issue with Win 7. Vista sucks badly.

Same, except Vista.

I'm using Windows 7 Professional 64-bit OEM, Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes (Paid), and Spybot.

Spybot, bleh. If there is any thing more useless than SUPERAntiSpyware it is Spybot.

[Tunnelcat]

Unless the SSD is bigger than the boot partition on your current OS drive, I'd give up on trying to clone it.

And honestly if it was my machine, I'd just do a new windows install on the SSD. There are a few things that windows does differently when it is on a hard drive (like automatically scheduled defrags, and no TRIM) that I wouldn't want persisting after the switch and the best way to be sure is to run a fresh instal. Just pull the other drives from the system, install windows on the SSD, then plug the other drives back in and you will be able to quickly copy most data manually. I actually have my OS/data from when I was on a mechanical still on the drive sitting on my shelf, if I put it back in the machine it'd boot right up (and immediately complain about needing about 50 updates).

Sounds like a reinstall is the way to go. I'm hoping for Microsoft to release SP2 on a disk, then I won't have to re-download all those updates. Damn, I need a faster connection speed.......like yesterday.

[Jeff250]

Sounds like a reinstall is the way to go. I'm hoping for Microsoft to release SP2 on a disk, then I won't have to re-download all those updates. Damn, I need a faster connection speed.......like yesterday.

If this is to be believed, SP1 will be the last for 7:

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-no ... ice-pack-2