mo832

dencorso, thanks for your attention. I tried your steps. It didn't help. Here is what happened: Firstly, there are 2 different kinds of red flags, 1. tells you that your OS is not supported. This will remain constantly on the machine and never goes away 2. tells you that something is currently wrong, as above (old defs, a virus detected, some setting wrong, needs your attention) I was able to do the remove operation, which flashed a warning immediately that files need to be updated to do a scan. I shut down and rebooted, and upon reboot, I got the same as always popup window that says OS is not supported and MSE is not compliant, etc. THEN, before I could go to click on the "update button", MSE was automatically changed to reflect the previous updates that I had just deleted! It must have loaded them from a saved file somewhere? Anyway, I clicked again to update, and it now has the latest files of 446pm 5/1/16, version 1.219.551.0. But the top red banner is still there and it still says OS is not supported (but the def's are all current and realtime is ON) So now I must believe that 4.4 has not been programmed to flash a scary warning, but 4.5 has, so that people are scared into going to Windows 8. Can you or someone else give me detailed steps to remove 4.5 and install 4.4 such that I don't run into any version conflicts and/or confuse the system so it blocks the install or corrupts my system? I generally am one to leave stuff alone if it is already working- this seems to be mostly cosmetic and it didn't give me trouble for over a year, but if it is not too corrosive for my system I am willing to "downgrade".

NeauCloux, Thanks for the tips. But I must tell you that the banner has ALWAYS been red, from the moment I installed MSE, which IIRC was AFTER XP went out of support. Every time I reboot windows xp, the startup routines run, and then I get a MSE popup window that says "support for this os has ended...". However, it has ALWAYS updated the virus defs automatically, and the update specs have been current anytime I check. The only time it didn't update was when this problem began in mid April, but now it is back to updating. I still get the red banner, which basically tells me I need to dump xp and go to a newer one (shut up MS), but it appears MSE still works as designed, but with a red warning. The program "knows" I am on XP, and it has been told to flash a warning to stop using XP. But if you read it closely, it doesn't actually say that MSE is not working. So again I ask, is the warning anything to worry about vs. MSE? It never says MSE won't work,, just no longer supported on my pc. And the defs are always updated. Comments?? Anybody? To be clear... the red banner was never dependent on or related to whether the defs were updating or not. Automatic or manual, the defs were updated, then it wouldn't update, then I manually updated for a few days, then it fixed itself, back to auto update. And the banner was red from start to finish and has never been green. EXCEPT, when updates started failing, after a week or so the "flag" icon in the tray went orange, and windows warned me that virus is out of date (which never happened before). Main page: real-time protection: ON, operating system support has ended Virus and spyware definitions: Up to date, operating system support has ended

Can someone comment on my other 2 questions, ie is there any harm/is it ok for me to continue with 4.5 and not bother with 4.4? (see my concerns in the original post). Thanks, mo

Thank you to all who commented on this topic and offered solutions or tips. Now that it seems to be solved (so far), I learned a few things that I have questions about. 1. How can you find and install version 4.4 of MSE now that support has ended and it is an outdated release? 2. Does it matter in any way if I now have version 4.5 and it always shows in red and says PC status at risk, OS support has ended? As long as I ignore the warning banner, is everything ok with the operation? Or would it be better to downgrade and get the green banner? 3. Leaving it to do automatic updates now, is there a danger that it will "break" XP or update routines that won't work in XP? Would going to the manual update method above be any different (ie download the update file from the link, extract the defs file and manually load the update)? Please note: I have been using 4.5 for about a year with no serious issues up to now (except the recent update problems discussed in this thread). I am just trying to be thorough.