Dave-H
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Everything posted by Dave-H
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Thanks! I've now simplified my exclusions by simply excluding all files with the LNK extension from scanning. As the folders I had excluded were all full of shortcuts, I thought this was more elegant and it still seems to work. I'm still getting occasional stops and restarts of the main Panda service, but it is usable. All the Panda functions seem to be working fine when the service is running. -
Sorry for the delay in responding again. Nothing has changed since my last report, the program is working, with my folder exclusions applied, with only occasional stops and restarts of the main Panda service. I can live with that in the short term. I'm still hoping, of course, that a fix will be applied and it will all come good again. Nobody has any definite evidence that Panda have deliberately stopped their XP version from working properly, only speculation. I will wait a while and ring AnyTech365 again if I've heard nothing from them about this. They will be as anxious as I am to get an answer from the Panda developers about this, I'm sure, as they will need to be able to give accurate support information to anyone else asking about this problem! Assuming that they do have a direct channel of communication to them, and it would be pretty stupid if they didn't, hopefully it won't be too long a wait for an answer, one way or the other.
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I got a response from Watchguard technical support. "At this time, we have not received any official communication indicating that Windows XP support for Panda Dome has been discontinued. Based on the information currently available, Windows XP continues to be listed as a supported operating system for the legacy Panda Dome version referenced on the Panda website. Based on the information you have provided, this issue appears to be related to **Panda Dome**, which is a consumer (home) product. While we understand your concerns regarding the recent crashes of **PSANHost.exe** on Windows XP, we are unable to investigate or provide support for Panda Dome through WatchGuard Technical Support." So it appears that they only deal with professional business customers at Watchguard support, and they can't help private domestic customers. I would have to use the domestic support channels for Panda support, which I've already done, of course! The guys at AnyTech365 have promised to let me know if they hear anything about the status of XP support from Panda, so all I can do is wait.
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I'm using Office 2010 on XP.
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Yes indeed, but if you remember, Malwarebytes did pretty much the same thing. They maintained version 3.5.1 for several years 'as is' for XP users and still provided pattern updates for it. Then they pulled the plug, without any warning, and no longer provided pattern updates, although the program still worked OK. Likewise, Panda keep 22.03.05 as their legacy version for XP users, which can still be downloaded and installed. As long as it still works, I'm not that worried if the program files are old. This is not quite the same scenario, of course, as Panda doesn't use local pattern files for scanning, which makes it even stranger that they would suddenly break XP compatibility. Whatever they do with the daily 'synchronisation' mechanism, it seems that has broken things. No program files have been changed as far as I can see.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Back again. I'm cautiously confident that I've found another workaround for the problem with Panda Dome, and this one appears to have stuck. I was puzzled as to why the crashes, although sometimes apparently at random, could be triggered at will, at least on my machine. One thing which nearly always triggered an immediate crash, even if the system had been running for some time without any, was to click the Windows 'Start' button. This led me to think that there was some issue with Windows Explorer which was triggering the crash. One other clue was that one of the first things I noticed was that if I clicked Start, even if it didn't crash, the user-added shortcuts were a blank box, only populating after several seconds. I tried excluding Explorer from scanning, but that made no difference. I then tried excluding my whole system drive from scanning. Hey presto, no more crashes! So, by a process of elimination, I eventually narrowed it down to the folders which were triggering the crashes when they were scanned. I now have three folders excluded from scanning – Documents and Settings\[Username]\Start Menu Documents and Settings\[Username]\SendTo Documents and Settings\[Username]\Recent So far this has stopped the regular crashes, and Panda has updated without them coming back again. This is pure speculation, but what I suspect happened here is that Panda rolled out an update which broke compatibility with the Windows XP Explorer, which is quite different from that on later versions of Windows, of course. When Panda tried to scan those folders, like the 'Recent' folder being scanned when 'Documents' is clicked on the Start Menu, this triggered a crash. This is of course only a workaround, not a fix, and the problem could come back at any time, but at least on my system it seems to have fixed it for now. There is a security issue with excluding system folders from scanning, of course, but as the folders concerned only contain shortcuts, I would think it's pretty minimal. If anyone else still has a malfunctioning installation of Panda Dome installed, I would be interested to know if this works for them.
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That's great, but as you say, it has to be more than just you and me! Especially good that they now have reports from two different countries. 👍
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Thanks, sorry I'd forgotten that! I've downloaded it ready in case I have to use it.
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Panda 22 is still warning me about dodgy website links embedded in other sites, so I guess the protection is still OK at the moment. Do you have a link to the offline installer for 21, should I need to use it?
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Oh I'll certainly give it a try if I can't rescue my present installation. I still have an open support case about it! If nothing comes of that, trying version 21 will be my next move. Strange that an older version would apparently be happy with the same update files which apparently crash the later version, though.
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I've now tried as a test removing the cache folder completely from my Panda installation. Rather unexpectedly, the program has not recreated it. It's been running for ages now like that with no crashes, but it's not updating, presumably because it has nowhere to put the files! Doing a manual update from the option in the settings does nothing. I guess I could leave it like that, but of course, like the version of Malwarebytes I used on XP for years, it will eventually become useless for protection because of no updates. I tried Avast on my system a few years ago and never got it to work on my desktop system. Even the supposedly compatible version for XP would not run, its core service obstinately refused to start, reason unknown. I even worked with Avast's technical support people about it, and even they couldn't determine what the problem was. I tried a test install on my netbook under XP, and that worked perfectly, so what the problem was with the desktop remains a mystery.
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The file version of the installer file is meaningless, unfortunately. It isn't the version of Panda Dome that it will install. It's probably just the version of the packaging process used. As far as I can see, the only way to find out what Panda version it is, without actually installing it, is to extract it with 7-Zip and look in the extracted \Program Files\Panda Security\Panda Cloud Antivirus\ folder. There you should find a file called version.ini, which, if you open it, will list the Panda version and build number.
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Well, I guess of those here still using XP, very few use Panda Dome, even though it's one of the vanishingly few security programs which is still supposed to work on XP. I found one instance on the virtually dead Panda forum reporting the same problem (with no response). https://support.pandasecurity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12151&sid=a73549f228b82be2dde1657a770a28e4 My installation is still crashing all the time. It stops if I clear the recent files in the cache folder but starts again as soon as the folder repopulates.
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Yes indeed, in fact, the first test I did was to replace that entire folder with one from an ISO image I made a few days before the fault appeared. It made absolutely no difference, it still carried on crashing, so I discounted the contents of that folder as having anything to do with the problem. I next looked for any other recently updated files in the Panda installation, and that led me to the cache folder in the Panda program files folder.
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It's a 020-3xxx-xxxx number, which should be a standard rate London number. There is no indication that it's a premium rate number, which by law in the UK there would have to be if it were. As I'm in London myself, with a 020-8xxx-xxxx home landline number, I would expect it to have been local rate. As such, the call should have been free on my landline phone package as long as it wasn't over 60 minutes long, which it wasn't.
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OK, an update. I rang the local UK number for Panda's technical support. It's operated by a company called AnyTech365. They took ages to answer the phone, but just as I was thinking about giving up, the call was answered by a very nice and very helpful guy, who sounded completely English! He wasn't aware of the problem, and I had the usual lecture about the risks of still using XP, but when I pointed out that Panda make a big thing of still supporting XP, he was quite conciliatory about it! Amazingly, when I said I'd already reported the problem via a web form, when I gave him the case number, he actually found my report from last Friday on his system! It's open and pending response apparently. I told him that I had, since the report, discovered that the files in the cache folder are apparently related to the problem, and he has added that information to the report. So, a rather better experience than I thought it would be! All I can do now is wait and see what comes back, but if nothing does, at least I now know there's a real person I can talk to if I need to.
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Not to get anyone's hopes up, but I may have found a fix, or at least a workaround. In the Panda program files folder, there is a subfolder called 'cache'. I looked at that and thought, 'clearing out caches is often a good idea'. After first backing it up, of course, I deleted all the files in it. The program then ran on a reboot, with no crashes. All the instabilities seemed to have gone away. The only thing that happened was that Panda started prompting me to OK the running of a lot of program files, so maybe that's where that data was stored before. After OKing all the prompts, things were still good, but surprisingly the cache folder still didn't seem to have anything in it. The folder originally contained a .mngr file, a .util file, a .code file, and several sets of .act and .sig files, which were in pairs with the same filename. The first three files were dated from the date of the program's installation; of the other pairs, one was from back in February, and the others were all from July 3rd this year. I put all the files back, except the recent ones, which I was suspicious of, and everything is still fine. So, was there a corrupted file or files in there?
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Well I'm still hoping to hear back from Panda technical support, so I won't do anything until I give up waiting if nothing happens! They do have a UK support phone number too. My installation has worked fine for seven months, with no problems at all, so if it's corrupted, I have no idea how or why. The service executable hasn't changed, so I can only assume it was something that was downloaded on a synchronisation update a couple of days ago.
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Mine seems to be a bit more stable now. It doesn't seem to crash spontaneously. The one thing that seems to guarantee crashing it is hitting the start button on the taskbar. That seems to generate an instant crash. After that it restarts and seems to settle down and doesn't crash again.
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That's only for XP users, though. We discovered earlier that if you download and install the latest version from Panda on Windows 10, say, you get that version. If you install it on XP, however, it automatically downloads and installs an earlier version (22.03.05). I assume that is the latest (and probably last) version for XP. The build date for that version is 12/08/2025, which I think you thought was December because you didn't realise the date was in European format, so it's August 12th, not December 8th, even older than you thought! The current version is 23.01.00.0000, whose build date is 29/06/2026, so very recent. Nothing back from Panda support as yet. I have disabled the real-time scanning, which has stopped Panda interfering with the rest of my system, but the service is still crashing. In my case I can only tell this by looking at the Windows System Event Log. The service is automatically restarted after 30 seconds.
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Well, I've reported the problem and had an acknowledgement back that the report has been received. Let's see what happens!
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I see absolutely no grounds for assuming that they are dropping XP support. There could be any number of reasons for this issue, none of them intentional. Could be an expired certificate, who knows?! There's only one way to find out, and that's to ask Panda, which I will!