Antimalware, firewall, and other security programs for Windows XP working in 2023 and hopefully beyond

[modnar]

Heh! What a mess Pandas cooked up what with their clumsy paws and all. Did M$ order them also to sour up XP? Others sure have followed. Or it's just their selfishness. I know that all those years I had AVG, Avast and also Avira they should be paying me now from all the benefits they received from their snooping, not cancel XP out. But traitors are among us.

For now I'm waiting to see if Pandas respond to Dave's message before I uninstall it for good and proceed with plan F (stands for failure).

Oh by the way, PSANHost crashed 2 times today already (the second day 22.03.04 is installed), once at boot delaying boot time (when it shows tray icons) by 30s ('cause recovery time is set to 30s) and once for sport just some time ago.

Edited 10 hours ago by modnar

[AstroSkipper]

No one can spoil Windows XP for me . I’m currently working on Plan C. First I need to free up some space on my hard drives so I can back up my main Windows XP partition as an image. And then it’s down to the nitty-gritty. 

[AstroSkipper]

Ok. Plan B vanished into thin air.  Panda Dome 21.01.00 also exhibits the same symptoms as version 22.03.05. I'll have to uninstall that, too. Without a working fix, Panda Dome will become unusable under Windows XP. Hope dies last.

[Dave-H]

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?