Over the last week I've been having to spend an inordinate amount of time fixing things, both personally and professionally, and I'm struck how often the twisted and sordid trails are leading to Trend Micro Internet Security.
This tale starts with my acquisition of Trend Micro Internet Security 2007. I've been Running Trend Micro IS v11 (which I think they call 2002) for quite a long time now, and it's served me well over the years. So, I figured that the latest version would be that much better.
I must say I was disappointed in it. An install of Trend Micro 2007 on a private machine caused an excruciating selection of gripes. It garbled the fonts in firefox (but not IE7 oddly enough) such that I had to turn on Clearfonts. Any time I attempted to install something from a disk image using Daemon Tools the installation was usually corrupt. Indeed, sometimes the act of switching disk images would cause a lockup, requiring a hard reboot to fix. At first I was blaming this on the new version of Daemon tools, but then I also noticed that internet connectivity was noticeably slower with TMIS 2007 installed than it was previously. After a while it began to add up, and sure enough, all these problems went away the instant I uninstalled Trend Micro 2007.
Oh, but it gets better. Remember my tried and true, long-loyal TMIS 2002/v11? It has turned on me.
Both at home and at work I've noticed odd problems. I could ping any IP address, but I could only ping certain machines by name but not certain other machines. If an explorer window accessing a network resource is left open in the background, the computer often would lock up. Applications that access network resources by the //server/share naming convention would also frequently lock the system so hard that not even the task manager could open. All kinds of bizarre behavior, all behaving in a contrary manner to how I understand windows based networking to work based upon 10 or so years of professional experience and untold more of private experience. But it occurred to me I could also trace this aberrant behavior to one night a few days ago when Trend Micro (which I naturally keep on automatic update mode) received an update that not only was a new pattern but also altered something to such an extent as to require a reboot. This is rare but does happen from time to time. That update not only happened on all 3 of my home PCs and my laptop, but also the good 50% of the machines at work that also run Trend Micro Internet Security (based on my recommendation, naturally). It was after this update that not only did some of my machines at home start acting funny, but a good many of the machines at work also started paralyzing themselves doing otherwise routine activities.
It took me a little while to put all the pieces together about exactly what the hell was going on (especially since the problem only affected machines with XP SP2 but not SP1 on them), but final confirmation of my coalescent theory came when I used task manager to end pccpfw.exe and tmproxy.exe (Trend Micro's software firewall and proxy, respectively), disabled the network connections, re-enabled them, and magically all the problems went away instantly. I could ping anything by name, access any network //server/share without lockups both in explorer and in our professional software... in other words, removing Trend Micro Internet Security fixed the problem. I reinstalled... and things go ok until I update to the most current version... and pow. Faster than I could say "thank you sir, may I have another" the lockups and misbehavior are back.
This leaves me feeling severely disgruntled, if not betrayed. In researching this problem, I found that trend micro experienced a similar problem back in 2005 (1, 2) where a bad heuristic pattern in a virus pattern update caused the exact same symptoms I am experiencing today. That day, they allegedly fixed it within 90 minutes, but several days after this reboot-necessitating update still nothing is surfacing. And I'm left with egg on my face as the "company computer guy" for having recommended this product in the first place (never mind the years of trouble-free service it has given us previous to this episode).
So now it's time to move on, unfortunately... I'm looking at Kaspersky as a possible replacement, I suppose... but I still feel bummed at the ending of my Trend Micro era. All these years of us conquering viruses and worms together have ended with a bad taste, and it feels to me like that one episode of Dukes of Hazzard where Boss Hogg hired a hypnotist and they planted a compulsion in Luke Duke's mind while he slept to sell the General Lee the next time it broke down, then arranged for the GL to have a rather minor engine stall. And here I am the Bo Duke of this metaphor, wondering why my buddy is now against me, selling off my badass car and leaving me stranded to the mercies of the Boss Hogg viruses of the world.
