About a month ago, i purchased a new pc from Dell. It came installed with Windows Vista Premium Home Ed. With the pc came Trend Micro's Internet Security 14. I've had past versions of TM's products and have been fairly pleased with them, so i was happy that i was getting I.S. with this new pc. Problem is, Vista has this issue with security and running apps that when trying to update, they never do until you set the application 'as an administrator'. Kind of a drag, but if it's an easy fix/work-around, I'll happily do it. Unfortunately, I've not been able to get I.S. to respond to the 'administrator' work around and constantly get kicked out of games and apps, because I.S. just will not update. It prompts me to patch/update and then reboot. When i do this, it tries to install the exact same patch. It's a vicious cycle. I got tired of playing this game and constantly getting kicked of apps to update or run scans. So i uninstaller it and installed a copy of AVG-free. I know it's a reliable app, but I'm thinking i hosed myself even worse.

Yesterday, i was closing out my email and my pc froze. Nothing would respond, so i hard booted and after about 45 seconds from boot up, it all quit responding again. This happened another 5 times until i got the CHKdisk screen telling me that files were corrupted and no longer working. This happened a few times and then when the pc finally gets to logging in, i go thru a process of my system goes extremely slow and erratic and I get the spinning circle that Vista has as its hourglass and all applications showing up with "(Not Responding)" in their title bars. While it is in this state, I naturally want to see what process is eating up the CPU (though the CPU gadget shows nothing amazing). However, when I press Ctrl+Alt+Del, all I get after a delay is a black screen and a dialogue box saying:

Login process has failed to create the security options dialog.

Failure - security options.

[OK]
I finally got it to boot and ran a defrag on the HDD. This morning, i booted up and the same thing happened after less than two minutes. I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and a black screen and then the same error as above.

i quickly uninstalled AVG thinking this all started after installing it and I've contacted Trend Micro to see if they can help out.

I apologize for being so long winded, but I'm frustrated and would love to fix this. I'd love if anyone had any ideas. If it's reinstalling TM, I'm fine with that, but I'd like to be able to have it update and not kick me out of my apps to run a scan or update.

strich

Welcome to SAF forum!!

Sorry, this sounds like a lame duck excuse but I don't have a dot-on universal fix for this problem. The whole industry is busy writting code for there apps and some aren't ready with stable code.

Options:

1) I would keep your Dell PC exactly like it was bought for warranty reasons, and keep complaining to them about same even though it may be in India. Do the recovery disks if ness.

2) Wait till drivers and the Vista code itself gets better, a MS patch will be coming soon we hope.

3) I would install XP in a different folder for the time being (as I have done).

I won't get "Vista" if Micro$oft paid me too use it.....I'll stick with XP & 98SE !!!

The Vista code is different, it's like a system written by coders for coders (much can be said for the C language but), there are all
these disparate tools with ad-hoc names and parameter sets that will drive one mad....

Thanks Moon!
I knew that i'd be dealing with unstable code when i ended up with the OS, but i figured if i stayed within the lists of 'useable' applicatins with Vista, i could ride it out until patches fixed the problems.

1) I've tried recovering from previous instances both before and after all of this started and get errors that the save points aren't valid or don't work (in fact, most all of the listed save points don't work). If i could get a stable build down, i'd save it myself instead of depending on the system to do it. I know i can go back and recover from the disk, but that, in essence, wipes everything and starts me from the beginning. i'm not thrilled aobut going through that all over again and reinstalling everything. But, i know it may be the only option in this case..
2) I can only hope. Ironically, i'm not having to many issues with drivers as many others are.
3) How do you install XP in a different folder? And what's the benefit of doing this? Is this giving me an option to boot to XP as opposed to Vista? I've never done a duel boot OS, so i'd have to figure out how to do it.

When i got home last night, i uninstalled AVG and reinstalled TM14. I'm still having problems with a bunch of the background apps dying, and i'm still receiving the same error i stated in my original post. I, for the life of me, cannot figure out what the security issue is. I can't figure out what application is causing it, but it completely seizes up my entire system and i feel lucky to be able to get it running normally.

Thanks so much for the responses!

Regarding the freezing up of Vista and the appearance of the error message Failure-Security Options when using Trend Micros Internet Security 14 ....

The reason for the problem is that there are two firewalls operating at the same time. One with Vista and one with Trend Micro's program. The best solution is to shut off the firewall in Vista using your Security icon.

The little red shield may have an X displayed if you have it visible at the bottom of your screen.

Hope this fixes it for you. It fixed my identical problem. No more reboots and CHKDSKs.

Derf