Windows workstation, server, firewall services
So at my work we have had problems with our HP laptops. We have recently switched from IBM laptops to HP laptops and have had nothing but problems with our newest model the nc8430. When we first started to deploy these laptops we would get what was known as the “svchost” problem. The customer would get an error right when their computer started and it would have some information that the svchost.exe process failed. This would sometimes cause the whole computer to lock up and sometimes it would be fine and they would just have to click “OK”. Our fix for this problem was to re-image the computer with a new image we had made and we just did that for every computer that came our way with this problem. A little time went by and we found out the svchost that was crashing was related to windows updates. Every first Tuesday of the month we would have more computers come in with this same problem. Our solution has still been to re-image the computer.
Lately, we have had computers that have services crashing. We first started noticing it when customers did not have sound on the computer. Of course this is what our customers noticed first. We soon realized that the computer also would sometimes not have the Windows Time service running. Through much Google searching and experimenting we found out that the computers would loose audio when the Server service would crash. This usually would then crash the Workstation service and in turn crash the Windows Firewall\Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service. When we would try to start these services again we usually received a Error 5: Access Denied. It didn’t matter if we were logged in as a local administrator or the user of the computer. We suspected it was a problem with our domain but when we took the computer off of the domain it still would not work.
After 9 hours on the phone with Microsoft and 3 more images (one built from pre-SP2) we found the solution.
Symantec Norton AntiVirus! The version of Symantec we were running on all of the machines with the problem was 10.1.0.396. We uninstalled that version and installed 10.2 (really 10.1.5.5000 in XP and 10.2 in Vista) and all of our problems have gone away. I am making this post for anyone that is having the same problem. I have found countless forums with this issue and even a few sites that had other fixes for the problem (their issue was other software). I am making this post so hopefully Google will lead a few poor souls with the same problem this way and they can save themselves some time in trying to solve one of these two issues.
If this helped you out feel free to leave a comment below.
*Update* Looks like the problem came back. I am still working with Microsoft but for now updating to the latest version of Norton may only be a temporary fix. I am still working on the problem and will update this whenever we find the solution.
*Update#2* Microsoft contacted me last week with a fix for the problem. The article about the problem can be found here and the actual download for the fix is here. The best part is I have seen these steps before and they didn’t fix all of our problems so we ignored them. The upgraded Norton along with this patch is what makes all of our problems go away. Microsoft sent me this link on May 2 but the article was “last reviewed” on April 25th (exactly 1 week before). I asked our support tech on May 3rd if the article was just created and he said it was created on April 3rd. The article had been changed! The article also says it is at version 2.0 right now but the only thing that was changed was the “last review” date. I asked our support tech about this and he said if it was revised it would have 2 dates, one showing the the created date and one showing the revision date.
Either way, our problem is now fixed (at least it has been for a little over a week now). It looks like Microsoft created this patch just because of our 10 hour phone conversation and emails.
*Update#3* Looks like there is more to this little problem. I noticed the patch that was given to us is now part of “critical updates” for Windows but it is a bit modified. The version that is going out through updates is 3.0 and not 2.0 like we were given previously. I found some great information over at the WSUS Product team blog. Check out that link for the files you need for a complete fix of this problem.