Dave-H
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About Dave-H
- Birthday 03/31/1953
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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. -
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.