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 yesterday at 11:13 AM 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?

 

 

[AstroSkipper]

This cache folder contains files downloaded when triggering the update button in Panda Dome settings. I also deleted all recent ones, and clicking the update button fills this folder with new ones again. If these are also corrupted or incompatible with the PSANHost process, the whole dilemma starts all over again. But as I already said, hope dies last.

Edited 10 hours ago by AstroSkipper

[Dave-H]

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.

[modnar]

I'm experimenting with Avast again... Good to see things moving. Might be resolved after all.

[AstroSkipper]

2 hours ago, Dave-H said:

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.

Is there a charge for people living in the UK, or is it covered by your standard phone tariff? In Germany, you have to dial special prefixes for support hotlines like this, which are extremely expensive.  A rip-off, so to speak. 

[AstroSkipper]

1 hour ago, modnar said:

I'm experimenting with Avast again... Good to see things moving. Might be resolved after all.

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.

[AstroSkipper]

My Plan C is about trying something new. I’m currently testing solutions that haven’t been tried here before. I’m in uncharted waters, so to speak. I’m deliberately not saying any more, as I don’t want to raise any false hopes. 

[Dave-H]

45 minutes ago, AstroSkipper said:

Is there a charge for people living in the UK, or is it covered by your standard phone tariff? In Germany, you have to dial special prefixes for support hotlines like this, which are extremely expensive.  A rip-off, so to speak. 

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.

[AstroSkipper]

The company AnyTech365 seems to be owned by Panda and is not only a call center. That's good so far.  Interestingly, there is also a German hotline number with the prefix 0800 which is generally free of charge here in Germany.  I wouldn’t have expected that.

Edited 4 hours ago by AstroSkipper

[AstroSkipper]

BTW, the cache folder inside the Panda programme directory is not the only destination folder for the updates. Files are, of course, also stored in various subfolders under Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Panda Security. 

[Dave-H]

 

2 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

BTW, the cache folder inside the Panda programme directory is not the only destination folder for the updates. Files are, of course, also stored in various subfolders under Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Panda Security. 

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.

[AstroSkipper]

16 minutes ago, Dave-H said:

 

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.

That was definitely a clever move. And has the PSANHost process crashed again since the cache folder was reset?