mo832

I know we are most likely done with constantly trying to hack/patch MSE to keep using it...... but I have to say, I miss the constant and wise, comforting presence of heinoganda

On one of my xp machines, I still have malwarebytes v1.65 installed from years ago. The last time I ran it was 2016. A few days ago, I opened it and it prompted me to update the signatures, which I did, and then I ran a full scan overnight. Is this old version, with new signatures, acceptable to run in 2019? Would it still be relatively effective?

Ok, so why do people correct each other when you say "I got a virus", and they say "actually, it's a worm". Who cares? Get rid of it! What is a "true antivirus" software?

I have an "elementary" question but would like some thoughts from you folks because I haven't ever gotten the concept... What is the difference between malware/ransomware/virus/worm? What is are the requirements to be considered anti-malware or anti-virus? Why do we make a distinction, why do we care what it's called, shouldn't we just protect against any "unwanted bad stuff"?

I think I found the problem!! The first thing I did when the problem started was to go to about:config and look for anything related to "smoothing". Whatever was there did not fix anything, so I moved on to other areas. Today, I had the impulse to go back and scour about:config line by line to see if anything would look to be related. I searched on "font" and see a bunch of lines related to gfx.* , I played with a bunch of them, toggled, changed values, etc., and when I found the one called gfx.font_rendering.cleartype.always_use_for_content; it was set to default(false). I set it to true and Boom!! Now... I think I would have remembered if I had done this myself, even accidentally. There is almost zero chance it was changed by me. How weird would it be to assume that Panda changed this?

Unfortunately, I don't have a recent enough one, and I had never before had to consider making a full backup prior to installing a reputable commercial AV program. MSE revenge!

No, nothing that I can see. Well, I am really getting more and more to believe Panda fiddled with my installed fonts. Panda itself uses a graphic font that looks very similar to how Gmail *used to* look when it was correct. It may have installed its own font and gotten rid of the one that gmail and other websites look for when rendering and now it has to approximate it with dots. If I remove Panda, I wonder if it will restore *all* elements to exactly how they were before Panda was introduced. I have my doubts.

@. Dave-H, I may not understand this stuff correctly, but there don't appear to be too many options in the latest Panda that would seem to make system changes. I remember AVG had all kinds of preferences, but Panda is very basic. I don't really know what I could switch off to test. I did turn off the AV altogether in the system tray but that didn't help.

Are you saying to uninstall Panda and then install it again? Do you feel this would repair the browser alterations? I have a feeling that this type of change (which should never be made IMO to another party's software) is not something that an uninstall would go back and return to the original state. And I don't even know what the changes were so I couldn't even begin to undo them manually. p.s.: I am happy to take this sub-thread to another location or private if it is going too off-topic p.p.s: Where would be an ideal place to get individual support? Geeks to go? Bleeping computer? MSFN? This is a peculiar issue where one software product corrupts a separate software product and/or the OS. Potentially 3 interlocking factors. I have already posted on the Panda forum and still not a single reply. That entire forum has low activity.

Thank you. I tried this (the test tab idea) and it did not change anything. The only thing that has worked so far is to check off the setting in FF options that says "allow pages to choose their own fonts...". Then I get a manually chosen, "crisp" display of arial font. But it messes up other pages with custom text. I wonder if there is a way to set that font checkbox by individual tabs? I have only noticed one global setting for all tabs and windows. *** Also*** I just noticed something new. It is not only for gmail. It happens even on this site (msfn.org) as I am viewing now. I suspect it will happen on every site with a new "tablet style" custom graphic font. I don't use that XP ff 47 for much surfing anymore, just my gmail and other light things, so I never tried to access this site with the new Panda revision in place. Since I was trying to test the fonts using this board as a guide I displayed this site on the old browser and noticed the font also displays jagged edges. Now we know it is not only a google/gmail issue, it is a general font or browser issue, which I am convinced was instigated by Panda. I don't know why it had to go digging into my settings . Please remember.... even with my existing setup and without changing any user agent or special tweaks, this all worked fine a few days ago... before Panda. edit: The more I think about this, the more I suspect Panda deleted one or more of my system fonts. I have seen this before with other software, if it can't find its favorite font in the system, it simulates the closest one

I'm willing to try this but I will need to understand how you mean the above. - are you saying to manually change the user agent string without actually installing a different browser? (I purposely did not upgrade firefox when some of my critical addons stopped working) - if yes, how to do this? - what is the thinking behind why this would fix the problem? Thanks

That's an interesting thought. I tried to "stop" panda antivirus and restarted firefox, but it did not help. Do you think this "blocking" would continue even if panda was not running at the time? Perhaps a permanent setting tweak when the program was installed?

It has been a loooong while since I used malwarebytes, but what I remember is that it is an on-demand scan. Does it have a persistent malware blocker that is always monitoring while windows is loaded? Even for version 1.75?

So I have a unique problem now. I know this is off topic and not the best place to ask this question, but I am hoping someone can direct me to the best place to ask the question and maybe have some hint as to why it is happening, since it seems to be directly related to mse/xp. As I noted above, I disable MSE and installed Panda. Everything appeared normal but now I notice when I run Firefox (ver 47) and go to gmail, the text renders in this weird jagged low-res format, as opposed to the new-look "tablet style" app text/font. This seems to be a direct effect of changing the AV software, since I made no other changes. Can anyone offer any hints or tips?

Well, based on the horror stories of Mathwiz and Dave-H, I decided to take the "chicken" approach and disabled the AM service and the MSE process in msconfig just to stop it from running on startup, and then did a restart to see if it would take effect. As expected, I got the red shield warning saying the MSE is reporting disabled. Then I downloaded and installed the Panda Security Free Antivirus. I didn't know if it would install, also recalling the comments that some people have success and others don't. To my delight, it installed normally, and to my pleasant surprise the install was pretty quick and straightforward. So far, so good, but I can say it "seems" to be much lighter. I hope this lasts and provides effective service. We'll see. Thanks to all of you for your helpful insights!!