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Tuesday, October 24th

More Symantec stuff



Turns out lots of people have had Symantec problems, such as http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/06/20/symantec-live-update-fun/.

There is also a short article on tracking down handle resource leaks at "How to keep Windows XP stable".

And while I'm at it, an article on the really, really, hidden files - http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/content/ms-hidden-files.shtml, that includes quite a few useful references.
dgc03052 on 10.24.06 @ 06:36 PM EST [more..] [No Comments]

Sunday, October 22nd

Software Support 101



I think I have the ideal big company software support process figured out -

Step 1) Have user fill out form, with many detailed fields for software, version, OS, free disk space, etc.

Step 2) Ask user to reboot, ignore what was submitted from step 1, and ask for detailed information on the software in use, version info, OS details, free disk space, etc. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 3) Ask user to uninstall, reboot, reinstall, and reboot the first product that the company makes mentioned in the answers from step 2. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 4) Ask user to uninstall, reboot, reinstall, and reboot for every product that the company makes listed in the answers from step 2. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 5) Ask user to uninstall, reboot, manually delete files, clear all temporary files, manually delete registry keys, reboot, then reinstall and reboot for every product that the company makes listed in the answers from step 2. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 6) Inform the user that their system/registry must have gotten corrupted, and that they need to wipe their disk, and reinstall everything on their system. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 7) Inform the user that they have a really rare case (actually just very rare to persist to this step), and provide steps to disable the first product that the company makes that was listed in step 2. Ask if this fixes the problem.

Step 8) Tell the user that this really should take care of the problem. Provide steps to disable every product that the company makes.

So far I have seen this from HP (for their printer drivers - net result was to disable the services with the problem "HPZinw12.exe takes almost 100% of the CPU in a laptop"), Symantec (discussed below), and Diskeeper (which had the added bonus that the product would automatically wipe the disk for you, to make sure you didn't skip any steps).

Now maybe if I could patent this, we might get somewhere.....
dgc03052 on 10.22.06 @ 02:29 PM EST [more..] [No Comments]

Friday, October 20th

Symantec System Slowdown Utilities, er....


mood: Irritated

Or, Norton Internet Security 2006, Norton AntiVirus 2006, DeadUpdate (I mean LiveUpdate), and so on.

So I was recently browsing around, and saw some of the usual complaining about how much Symantec drags down your system. Specifically, Ed Foster's Gripeline at InfoWorld, at Gripe1, Gripe2, and some of what it references - such as What_Really_Slows_Windows_Down. It reminded me (again) of how bad Symantec has gotten..... Oh for the days when Peter Norton was involved....

For background, I have used Norton Utilities since the very early DOS days, and still have the 1985 edition of Peter Norton's Guide to the IBM PC. Still have backups with the original DOS tools as well, lying around somewhere. Things became much less useful when Windows got popular, but still. I loved all the original Peter Norton stuff, utilities, and so on. Very useful stuff when writing device drivers, building custom PC hardware, and the like. More out of loyalty than any real reason, I picked up Norton Systemworks when I needed some utilites. What a disaster.... Norton Ghost appeared to work great - reboot, do full backups, everything verified, and so on. Only problem was, everything was unrestorable. Totally worthless, never got anywhere with it. I had other backup software, so other than a huge waste of time, no problems, removed Norton Ghost, but left the other tools in.

Norton Internet Security and Antivirus trial version came with the laptop, so when the trial ran out, rather than do all the uninstall, and play with other stuff, I just kept them. So things were clearly resource hogs, and some of the tools were worthless, but I kept them, rather than take the time to remove everything and probably have half the same issues with other tools. I actually liked Norton Password Manager, which came with the 2004 version of Systemworks. It seems they might be resurrecting it in the Norton Confidential program, but I can't see buying anything new from them...

Anyway, along came 2005, and with the renewal prices versus upgrade prices, I went ahead and upgraded. Well, that was a waste of money. Systemworks no longer included the password manager, and there were all sorts of uninstall/install problems. It was horrible trying to get NPM from Systemworks 2004 up and running with the 2005 versions of all the tools. 2005 Systemworks wouldn't install without uninstalling the entire 2004 version, installing the old over the new either failed, or created problems.... Anyway, I eventually got it all running together - one of those things where a lot of time has already been invested, a lot of the issues are finally known, so why throw away the money already spent and buy a new set of tools with a new learning curve.

Along comes 2006, and same issue again. Once again I went with the cheap route, and upgraded.

Now, all along, my system would periodically get really slow, and start having failures opening windows - all the classic signs of resource starvation. After some reviewing of http://www.sysinternals.com/ , and Mark's blog - http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/ (now at the new location of http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/default.aspx), somewhere around the Sony Root kit fiasco timeframe, I finally look into it. Symantec is an enormous resource hog, but so is Outlook, and my tendancy to leave a half dozen Word windows open, a couple of spreadsheets, and so on. Best I can come up with short term, without the real time to devote to it, is to bump the available handles way up - e.g. follow http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126962/en-us, and bump the sharedsections value up, since I don't run multiple users.

That works for a while, but still have to periodically reboot to get enough resources back (every couple of weeks - normally I just suspend).

One time, my system runs out of resources quite quickly, so I look into it some more. It turns out LiveUpdate is running every 5 minutes (apparently because it was failing, and rescheduling for 5 minutes later), AND their symlcsvc.exe license manager service is leaking 42 handles every single call. Well this clearly is a problem, so now that I know why the failure is occuring, I reboot and look into it further.

Turns out, after reboot, LiveUpdate now succeeds, but symlcsvc.exe still leaks 42 handles every time LiveUpdate runs - even if I just manually run it, and it finds absolutely nothing to update. Well, that is clearly a bug, and to me, a pretty serious one, since LiveUpdate defaults to running pretty frequently - something like every 2 hours, which means it always runs after every resume. Now, the workaround is obvious, run LiveUpdate less frequently, but I figure I'll try to be nice, and report the bug to Symantec support. After all, I have no idea when the bug started happening - it may have been recently introduces by a previous LiveUpdate, so maybe it could actually get fixed.

Now note, I don't expect them to just suddenly believe I know what I'm talking about, but I did have the vague hope that if I give them all the details to very quickly replicate the issue on their own, somewhere along the line someone would actually take the 2 minutes involved, replicate the issue, and log a bug.

Well, that is just the start of a huge waste of time, showing the uselessness of Symantec support and Symantec QA. I've linked the emails below, with summaries. Unfortunately, I don't have my initial report - since their messages never include anything we ever sent in before. What really ticks me off is that my sole expectation from all of this was for them to log a bug in their internal system, so maybe a developer would actually fix it - but no - never happens. Instead they finally tell me to use the workaround I suggested in my initial report - gee - that really helps. If you are interested, you can follow how I include screen shots, process viewer details, and everything that should easily show a developer what the issue is - or I have my summary interpretation for each. Many thanks to sysinternals, as usual.... Note that at the bottom of each message, I added links to the Next and Previous, as well as links for attachments, or the Outlook message format where the images don't export properly....

You can either start here "1 - RE'Case002-372-278' .htm", or see the extended text by viewing just this blog entry from the link entry below.

Of course, I have a similar story with Diskeeper trashing disks (and that they feel it's not their fault, even though their scan shows no problems, but then proceeds to basically wipe the disk), but maybe some other time.



dgc03052 on 10.20.06 @ 02:39 PM EST [more..] [No Comments]

Thursday, October 19th

Blog Cleanup



OK, so as usual, spammers have found things, and did the usual blog spam comments. Not sure if those are related to the "karma" negative votes (or if those were just the spammers seeing if they had access), but finally made a pass to clean things up, ban some of the recurring IP addresses, and disable comments on the entries that seem to be regularly spammed. Of course it won't hold for long, spammers being the slimes that they are, but anyway.... If I continue to use this very sporadically, then I may just totally disable comments, or if I feel the need to regularly post, I may have to move over to blogspot or something....
dgc03052 on 10.19.06 @ 08:17 PM EST [more..] [No Comments]


Travel - Countries



So I guess that updates the countries I've stayed in (meaning a real night in a hotel, not just the airport) to be:

Canada (Montreal, Vancouver)
China (Mainland - Shanghai, Beijing)
England
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong (really an administrative district now - but separate passport stamp)
Ireland
Italy
Japan
The Netherlands
Singapore
Spain
USA (At least AZ,CA,CO,DC,FL,GA,MA,ME,NH,NJ,NY,OH,PA,TX,VA,VT,UT, plus day trips)

dgc03052 on 10.19.06 @ 03:25 PM EST [more..] [No Comments]


Travel



Yet another update....
After the April 06 DC trip, there has been:
May 2006, D.C.
June 2006, Osaka, Japan
July 2006, Hawaii (Cruise)
July 2006, Vancouver
August 2006, Beijing
August 2006, D.C.
September, 2006, San Jose, CA
December 2006, D.C. (pending)
dgc03052 on 10.19.06 @ 03:13 PM EST [more..] [No Comments]