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Long story short, I have revived Comodo Antivirus 12.0.0.6818 (CAV) as part of the Comodo Internet Security suite (CIS) since it was no longer working out of the box. It's one of the last working antimalware programmes with real-time protection, HIPS, VirusScope, secure containmenr, online definition updates, even incremental definition updates, and the possibility of offline updating. This is now my new antimalware programme. And Vir.IT of course. All free of charge.

Thanks @Tangy. I would be interested to know your results. Just an update, I spoke again today to Panda's technical support people at AnyTech365. Again, really friendly and helpful people, who knew exactly what I was talking about. They are thinking, as many here do, that Panda have actually withdrawn support for XP. They agree that doing this by just breaking the legacy version of Panda Dome, is not a good way of doing this, especially for paying customers, and they are trying to find out whether this really is the case or whether this has been done accidentally and will be fixed, if indeed it's possible to do that. There has certainly been no change made to the system requirements on Panda's website, and the article trumpeting its XP compatibility claims to have been updated on July 1st. They have given me a number to ring for Watchguard, Panda's parent company, so I will try giving them a ring tomorrow to see what they say about this.

At the moment, I am very satisfied with CAV and Vir.IT as both use offline definition files. Comodo's definition file base.cav is nearly 640 MB in size and therefore much pattern inside.

Of course, only there is a limit of RAM memory size.

It’s clear and obvious that Panda stopped supporting Windows XP for programme updates quite some time ago. The latest version is 22.03.05, nearly one year ago, and that was a long time ago. But to then go and break even that version via the automatic update – that’s a no-go. And in doing so put the user’s partition at risk.

@AstroSkipper I mean RAM. I got 8 GBs. MY xp reads around 3 GBs. There is something that my system does not like about it. I have not put any effort to find out what is causing that. Could it be that my xp is 32bits ?

What kind of memory are you referring to? RAM or hard disk/SSD memory? 🤔 On my old P4 machine, Vir.IT eXplorer Lite is the antimalware programme that uses the least RAM of all. Avast, on the other hand, was a monster. 🦖😜

Unfortunately most of online scanners require 64 bits windows ( Trend micro, Eset . F Secure etc.) #2 bits support has been dropped. I have installed panda cloud cleaner. @modnar You fot a point regarding the Italian one. My system No antivirus ( computer idle desktop) memory usage is 16%. Panda installed memory 19% - 20%, Avast installed memory 21% - 23% . Italian one 29% - 46% . Also PC tools seems to be alergic to it. Had to uninstall it. I am not willing to pay for something that can render my pc almost inoperable. About comodo have not used it for ages and if my memory serves my right it is very hard to get rid of it. @Dave-H I am willing to reinstall panda and do what you have suggested. Keep you posted.

Thanks, no problem! I'm still hoping this will be fixed eventually, especially as I'm a paying customer. I'm still getting messages in my event log that the Panda service has stopped unexpectedly and been restarted, but no actual crash messages. It's usable, but annoying! If nothing has happened soon, I will ring their technical support guys in the UK again and see if they know anything. I won't be wasting my time with any more online forms!

There's a thread in the Vista forum about getting certain versions of VMware Workstation and Player to work beyond the official supported versions. https://msfn.org/board/topic/180052-tutorial-how-to-install-vmware-workstation-11-or-12-in-vista/ Workstation 10 and Player 6 are the last versions officially supported on XP, 2003, and Vista. Early versions of Workstation 11 (and Player 7) won't install on XP/2003/Vista but when inspected the maximum requirement of any of the .sys drivers is NT 6.1 which corresponds to Vista SP1. In previous VMware versions there were additional, separate driver files for XP-based Windows versions (32-bit and 64-bit). Notably the vmx86_64 driver was shared by 64-bit XP/2003 and later versions of Windows, so there weren't separate versions. In VMware 11 it looks like no additional dependencies have been added to the vmx86_64 driver. Its minimum OS requirement has been bumped up from 5.2 to 6.0, but with the lack of new dependencies I'm guessing it would still work in XP if that limitation in the header were removed. Depending on how much the other drivers have changed, there's a small possibility that where the VMware 11 drivers are truly incompatible with XP/2003 64-bit the VMware 10.x 64-bit drivers may be able to replace them. I checked a couple of other drivers (but not all of them) and again noticed no change in dependencies for the Vista-compatible 10.x drivers vs. the Vista-compatible 11.x drivers. This is a good sign, but doesn't necessarily reflect whether the 11.x drivers are providing any new, critical functionality that wouldn't be present if the Vista-compatible 11.x drivers that the 11.x installers include are replaced by XP-compatible 10.x drivers. For example, if critical new functionality related to networking is absent inside the 10.x drivers the Workstation/Player software could potentially run but only if networking is always disabled. As far as the many DLL files that VMware 11 is bundled with, they all still seem to be built targeting NT 5.2 at most, but I'm not certain that I checked 100% of them. I plan to look into this a lot more in the future, but I don't have time now and this will likely get put off for months or longer. If anyone else wants to mess around with this I figured I'd share what I observed so far.

In the mean time I have cleaned my system of pandas, so I cannot really be of assistance. As we've all observed their technical support is a joke and now also their program is a joke, even more as it was before, so good riddance. I don't know why they would be promoting themselves as best for WinXP though, when clearly they do not want anything to do with us.

@Dave-H If you absolutely want to stick with Panda – presumably because you still have a valid licence – then I’d uninstall it completely, give everything a thorough clean, then reinstall it, but without allowing any connection to the internet. Then set the cache folder to read-only for everyone, especially for the System account, or if that doesn’t work, delete it completely. Then set all your exclusions and only then connect to the internet. No updates must be carried out locally. Perhaps it will then run stably. But to be honest, this isn’t of course a good workaround, as it unfortunately results in a loss of functionality. Personally, I’m done with Panda and would only go back if an official fix has been released or the update server has been corrected.

Assuming you haven't already uninstalled Panda, could you try excluding from scanning the folders I detailed in my earlier post? I would just be interested to know if this helps the problem on your system. I'm still getting occasional stops and starts of the main Panda service, and I'm trying to find out exactly what is triggering them. Again, not a fix, just a better understanding of where the mechanism is now failing. Incidentally, Panda's online support forms are pretty useless, as once you've submitted one, you are supposed to be able to add new information to it by clicking on the link in the e-mail it sends you. Unfortunately, this doesn't work. When you submit the revised form, you just get an error message that the e-mail and customer number don't match any current user! I've had to submit two further forms from scratch to give them more information.

It works!

And that's one more reason to avoid Avast, at least on Windows XP. I’ve had so much trouble with Avast in the past that I’ll probably never use it again, even on other operating systems. Even though I’m not a fan of Avast, it’s quite possible that the lack of an internet connection is the reason why your attempt failed. Try again with an active internet connection!

For experimenting with Avast, you should avoid the last XP-compatible version. As far as I can remember, is a previous version associated with fewer problems. I have to look in my archive for the exact version number. As far as I can remember, there were repeated reports on the Avast forums that avast! Free Antivirus 18.5.2342 runs much better than the latest XP-compatible avast! Free Antivirus 18.8.4084.0.

@Tangy Perhaps you can try Panda Dome 21.01.00. I am under the impression that this version is working better on Windows XP. It's definitely worth a try.

All Panda Dome installers come with offline installer version 15.14.5.0. Therefore, this information is unfortunately of no use. I asked you for the programme version. The most recent is 22.03.05 but I currently use 21.01.00. And it doesn't matter whether you actively click the update button or not, the update is automatically done every day and there is no option to disable it.

No problems here. With default settings the font ls shown correctly.