mhmallory

I have the strangest problem with Xpize 5.4 installed. I have 2 hard drives installed on my desktop. It is XP Pro SP3 freshly installed with latest patches. hotfixes. and drivers. On my boot drive, in Windows Explorer all of my files and directories are displayed correctly. Here is the strange part. On my secondary drive, in Windows Explorer 2 directories are shown at the end of the listing, but correct in the 'Folder' portion of Windows Explorer. If you notice the 2 directories are not in a sorted order, and one directory is missing 'Date Created' and 'Date Modified'. I have a few screen shots that hopefully make what I' m not seeing clear at - http://cid-b0e9636dd582e08a.skydrive.live....4&ct=photos. I also have formatted and reinstalled XP twice, same results. Also, there are no shell extensions, etc. installed and I only see this with Xpize installed. In Windows Explorer, I have tried 'Tools' , 'Folder Options' ,'View' 'Reset All Folders', and re-applied a fresh view of options, with the same result. I have also tried to 'rebuild icons' with Tweak UI XP. Like I said, there is nothing out of the ordinary install, just XP and Office 2007. Look closely at the screen shots to get an understanding of what I' m babbling about. If I' m losing my sanity, please make a suggestion on how to fix. TIA, mhmallory Also, I just tried Ultra Explorer from http://www.mustangpeak.net/download.htm , and I see same problem.

The first thing I did was to open a bug report at the Microsoft Essentials Connections site, and turned on tracking to be notified of a response. Note, I choose not to post it to the forum because I kept screen shots of the results, and I felt that someone in development would want to take a look at what happened. I'm hoping to hear something back soon, to give them a chance to retrieve any log files that might be relevant or any session events in the events logs. I have been 'trolling' the MS Essentials Forum, and have noticed a couple of posts with similar problems. MS has suggested the same steps I followed, 1)Make sure there are no conflicting anti malware programs installed. 2)If no conflicting programs, submit a bug report. In beta of any product I' m willing to accept the risk of doing a 'repair install' of the base OS if things don't go as planned. I also fully understand the need for email scanning but I was a completely shocked to see Microsoft Office 2007 hosed. At this point, my only solution is to reformat the disk and reinstall XP, Office, etc. I' m sure MS development understands 'software life cycle management schedules', and Office 2007 will be a supported offering for a few more years down the road until Office 2010 is fully deployed. To clarify, I should have phrased my post strongly suggesting to not install on a system that you use on a day to day basis, only on a spare system. I' m lucky because I have my essential files mirrored to a backup disk. The only thing is I' m gun shy at this point and would only install and evaluate Essentials on a VM. The problem with this approach is if a bug pops up, rightly or wrongly I' m sure MS response would be that this is invalid testing because it is running in a VM and to contact VMWare support to address the issue. The only fault is on me because I thought according to MS and other tech websites, was that there was a push to release Win 7 and Essentials RTM at the same. I wrongly considered Essentials 'beta' as a more mature 'beta' release and closer to going 'gold' and RTM at a fast tracked schedule. I also just recently checked the MS Essentials forum, and there are a couple of posts of high CPU use when real time protection has been turned off. I also noticed that are a few posts complaining of high CPU/RAM use with MsMpEng when system is idle. mhmallory

I' m wondering if anyone tried the scenario I described. In other words turn off real time monitoring, and leave the system alone a few hours. The situation I described usually indicates a 'memory leak' or a problem with one of the sub modules in the program itself. I would not be surprised to see an issue like this, with Essentials at the beta stage. As I said installation went smoothly, the %100 CPU usage problem began to appear after several hours. mhmallory

I also was pretty encouraged when I read the reviews. For me it just did not perform as advertised. If you notice, I did not bash MS. I personally think that MS Development has a vast knowledge base to draw from. This said, I' m speculating that Essentials uses software hooks in yhe kernel that possibly did not get cleaned up during uninstall. Also note, the system CPU was at %100 during removal of Essentials, and there is no telling what process did not complete as it normally would have. Also, if other users are not aware the http://www.codeplex.com/ site is Microsoft sponsored. Microsoft Software Developers release many useful utilities and programs to the public as Open Source. mhmallory

I sucessfully installed Microsoft Security Essentials on my Compaq D51S Desktop, P4 and 2 GB of memory which has a fresh install of XP Pro fully patched and all hot fixes applied. The desktop did not have Windows Defender installed or any other AV or Firewall. After the install of Essentials with the latest definitions installed, I did a full disk scan with no malware or viruses detected. I then decided to 'disable real time detection' but opted for a full scan every twenty four hours. After several hours, I noticed that the desktop was at %100 CPU utilization. I checked 'Task Manager' and the only abnormal process was MS Essentials. I also looked closely for any process I did not recognize, and also at 'svchost' processes which were normal. I also use a opensource called svchost viewer tool from http://svchostviewer.codeplex.com, which gives provides a detailed list of what an 'svchost' process is connected to. The desktop became more and more unresponsive, but I was able to reboot from the "Start Menu'. After rebooting, the desktop became unresponsive to the point of necessitating a hard boot. I reboot several times, regained control to the point that I was able to use 'Add Remove Programs' from the 'Control Panel', and removed Essentials. After removing Essentials, and the high CPU usage problem non-existent, I attempted to open a 'Word Document' and received the following error pop-up box . I attempted to create a new Word document, and received the same error. The weirdest thing was that I could create or open an attached Word document in Outlook 2007, which uses Word 2007 as the message editor. I then did a 'repair install' of Office 2007, navigated to Office Updates, and Windows Updates to make sure that no hot fixes or patches had been removed with the 'repair install' process. The only patch that was missing was Office 2007 SP2 which I reinstalled and rebooted. After reboot, I again attempted to open or create a Word document, and received the same error message. I decided to do a 'remove' Office 2007 using the DVD. This is when everything really went to 'Hell'. After removing Office 2007 and a reboot, I attempted to do a 'Install' of Office 2007. After accepting the product key, after several minutes the Office installer stopped with an error. I tried a couple of more times to install Office 2007, but continuously get an installer error. I know what followed at this point is a full OS install, but I decided to attempt an install of Office 2003 which fails with an 'incorrect product key'. My XP, Office 2007, and Office 2003 are valid purchased MS products. I' m making the assumption that once the Office 2007 service packs and patches are installed, their is no longer a downgrade path from Office 2007 to Office 2003. I' am a Software Quality Engineer by profession. I can fully sympathize with Microsoft Software Quality Assurance and System Test Engineers. They have an enormous software product base to support, as well as a huge hardware platform base to support and perform regression test with any new product base release or software hot fix/patches/service pack release. Microsoft has acknowledged that it took a 'big black eye' with Vista and its release to the public for consumption. I hope for their sake, that Essentials does not 'blacken the other eye'.

Try downloading vistacodecs (32/64 version) at http://shark007.net, uninstall the codecs package you have install now, reboot, then install vistacodecs.