Posted on 12/12/2018 12:29:41 PM PST by fireman15
A follow up to my follow up... the laptop is working OK this morning after it spent the night scanning itself, but I noticed a few unusual new behaviors. So I ran the winver command and it did not roll itself back. It erased all the restore points that went to the time before the latest update and there is no option to go back to the version that I had before or uninstall the update. If I had taken an image of the system in addition to creating restore points I assume I could but I didn’t. The most annoying issue to me currently is my scanner is still not working with it. I assume that I will eventually be able to get it to work again... but who knows. Microsoft and Epson would probably prefer that I bought a new multi-function printer. So the evil empire wins this round.
Bummer - both my PC and laptop seem to be fully operational after the latest updates....both devices are HP.
It is working now. The primary problem was that I had a couple of old ISO files with malware in files stored in them. Either Windows defender was updated and works a little differently now or the definition update just added the malware. Defender apparently can identify the malware in an ISO but is apparently unable to delete it. So it went into a loop and sucked up all of my hard drive’s bandwidth. Windows would not just let me delete the files because they were being “used” by another process, Windows Defender. I had to do a restart to get to a command prompt before windows had a chance to choke on them. Once I deleted the two ISO files everything started working again.
Our newish laptops are both HPs as well purchased from Costco.
Good to know - could reduce troubleshooting time in the future.
To me it seems incredible that a couple of old iso files that were used to simulate CDs in virtual machines could bring the system to its knees. The “malware” within them was old and harmless; it had been identified and quarantined by malwarebytes years ago. I thought Malwarebytes might no longer be compatible with Windows Defender. But uninstalling it did not have any affect.
This appears to be a design flaw in this latest version of Windows Defender that I have not seen documented. All one has to do to paralyze the latest Windows system is plant a couple ISO files with basically anything that would be identified as malware. Windows Defender will find it but is apparently unable to do anything about it. It should just mark them as quarantined and move on. Instead Hard Drive use by “Antimalware Service Executable”, the active component in Windows Defender hovers around 100% and the computer basically is disabled.
As soon as I restarted the computer in command prompt mode and deleted the two ISO files everything went back to normal. They had been reported as active threats by Windows Security under “Virus and Threat Protection”. They were files that I no longer use so I just tried to permanently delete them in Windows Explorer by using shift delete. A popup would show that it was being calculating how long it was going to take to delete the files. Then nothing would happen. I opened a command prompt as an administrator and also was unable to delete the files. The only thing that worked for me was to reboot the computer into command prompt mode and delete them that way.
This problem had me stumped because after running complete scans things would appear to go back to normal for awhile. I would conclude things were up and running, then an hour later the computer would start acting up again.
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