MS Security Essentials slows down PC at startup

I have been having problems with MS Security Essentials Anti-Virus. When the computer starts up i notice it to be very slow, i cannot access network links and i notice that the network icon does not load until i end "MsMpEng.exe" which i know is related to MSE.

I have seen this on numerous client computers running XP & Win7 at different locations. I have down malware scan and spyware scans and all is clean.

I have taken off this AV in the meantime until it gets fixed (re-installing MSE does not help). I just want to know if anyone have come across this before and is there a fix/workaround?

I am guessing windows has done some updates or MSE Has done a faulty update to cause this.

Oh boy... I have never seen or had a problem w/ MSE; not in my machines nor any of my clients' machines.

I would suggest you completely remove MSE & then re-install it from here,
Microsoft Security Essentials - Free Antivirus for Windows

Cheers,
Drew

Originally Posted by woeisme

I have been having problems with MS Security Essentials Anti-Virus. When the computer starts up i notice it to be very slow, i cannot access network links and i notice that the network icon does not load until i end "MsMpEng.exe" which i know is related to MSE.

I have seen this on numerous client computers running XP & Win7 at different locations. I have down malware scan and spyware scans and all is clean.

I have taken off this AV in the meantime until it gets fixed (re-installing MSE does not help). I just want to know if anyone have come across this before and is there a fix/workaround?

I am guessing windows has done some updates or MSE Has done a faulty update to cause this.

Yo... Woe;
Welcome to the forum.
There are some known issues, under certain conditions with Microsoft Security Essentials, for instance;
This problem with Lenovo Re: Access Connections Problems With Windows 7 and... - Lenovo Community
Generally, across the board, MSE is a very un-intrusive, small foot print, easy on system resources, anti virus solution so when you see problems like you are having crop up, you may want to look at the whole picture and see if you can determine what may be causing the slow down. They can be extremely difficult to detect but it may be worth your efforts.
I have not heard of any problems with recent updates/signature releases, although seems like all vendors manage to do something like that sooner or later.
Regards
Randy

Suggest you look @ msconfig for things running in the background @ Start-up that may be causing your slowdown. 1 of the 1st things to do in a situation like this run chkdsk /r/f as Admin & sfc /scannow. It is highly unlikely MSE is the culprit.

Drew

Next time you uninstall it, use the right uninstaller which you find in this list: AV Uninstallers - Windows 7 Forums

Or perhaps from here Security Software | SingularLabs the original list author's site.
Very cool list of other resources and tools as well for other types of uninstallers http://uninstallers.blogspot.com/

I have to agree with the other members, I've never seen MSE drag down a computer to this date. Usually, once installed & updated, it speeds it up, especially if a "heavy" AV/IS suite was previously installed.

MSE is perhaps the lightest AV on the market, even on my low spec desktop, doing a full scan only used about 25 to 30% of the CPU & less than 2GB of my installed 4GB RAM(with whatever other services were running).

I recommend it to all who asks me about a good, free AV that won't bog their computer down. You can open up the Task Manager while MSE is running, to see what processes are going on. Usually, the answer will be in there somewhere, as it clearly shows how much resources each process is using. Perhaps a out of date software that's not needed anyway? At any rate, something's running wide open that shouldn't be.

And don't forget the obvious. Defragging your computer makes a difference. As well as unloading all of those no longer needed temp files that may be lingering around.

If all else fails, a clean install may be the answer. All of the members above remembers when I was trying to install ESET Smart Security on 2 different computers (within the last week), clean installs solved all. As long as there's not an underlying hardware issue, clean installs solves 90+% of computer software issues, including AV/IS installs.

Best of Luck,
Cat

I just had the same problem with Microsoft Security Essentials bogging down my computer making it boot up much slower than usual and also caused Internet Explorer 9 to lock up and not respond as well. Removing and re-installing MSE did not solve my problems. My problems with MSE didn't start occuring until yesterday, 08/13/2012. After I uninstalled MSE again one more final time, my computer is booting up normally as fast as it did before, and I no longer have problems with Internet Explorer 9 not responding any more either.

Tom,

Extremely weird, rare & unexpected to have (such) problems rooted to MSE. For myself & all my customers, have never seen such a thing. Since security is needed, have you re-installed MSE (latest version)? This sort of behavior is often attributed to things like Norton but, not MSE.

Regards,
Drew

Originally Posted by Drew

Tom,

Extremely weird, rare & unexpected to have (such) problems rooted to MSE. For myself & all my customers, have never seen such a thing. Since security is needed, have you re-installed MSE (latest version)? This sort of behavior is often attributed to things like Norton but, not MSE.

Regards,
Drew

I did go to Microsoft website to re-install the latest version of MSE, and still this didn't do anything to remedy the problems I was having. I also noticed that the MSE software was alerting me on more than one occasion that I needed to validate that I was using a genuine copy of Windows. That is what clued me in that the computer problems I was experiencing were probably originating from a recent revision of MSE, and must be a glitch in the latest MSE software revision, since I've never encountered problems like that previously on my computer.