I really like Comodo FW and use it on an HTPC, and on a few occasions while watching a movie full screen, the media player (Media Player Classic Home Cinema in this case) has suddenly become “windowed” (i e not full screen) and you can read a message at the bottom something like “attention taken by Comodo update”. Very annoying, in the middle of a movie! >:-D I think it has only happened when the internet connection was down, so probably Comodo wanted attention to tell me it couldn’t check for updates. I already tried disabling all ticks in the “general” tab of “settings” except “check for updates”.
There is no real need to update any firewall very often - at startup would suffice, or even weekly. Is there any way to control this, besides disabling updates altogether? Is there any config file or registry setting that stops it from grabbing attention? Seems I can start cfpupdat.exe manually, but can I pass any arguments to it to make it check for updates without prompting (e g from the scheduler), then shut itself down if there are no updates (so that I don’t have to manually allow update checking each time I start the PC)? Or something? ???
You can disable the program updater under More → Preferences → General.
As I wrote, I already know that. I’m looking for a way for it to still update automatically, without this annoyance.
Does disabling “Show balloon messages” help here? If that doesn’t do the trick then I am out of options.
As I wrote, I already tried disabling all ticks in the “general” tab of “settings” except “check for updates”. That incudes baloon tips and tray animation etc.
I’m trying to make Comodo FW user friendly on an HTPC. Most people like their firewalls to be “set & forget”. Seems the best option is to disable updates, but that’s kinda like giving up too.
There is already a bug report for this. Let’s see when it gets fixed.
Would you mind posting a link to that bug report thread?
I searched the forum and googled before i started this thread, but I got only tons of hits for totally different topics, since the keywords are the same for many other problems.
One theoretical solution would be to add cfpupdat.exe to Windows’ scheduler (and there why not use criterion to check at start of Windows). Might be an option if I could pass arguments to cfpupdat.exe to make it go ahead without prompting and minimized.
Thanks.
One interesting observation: During the update, there are TWO identical Comodo icons in the task bar, one that belongs to the “ordinary” Comodo application, and one that belongs to the updater (which is revealed if you hold the mouse over the icons). I think this is interesting since it shows the updater application is a separate process, not part of the ordinary Comodo application. And very likely it’s the cfpupdat.exe that is up and running and grabbing the attention. If my assumptions so far are true, this should mean a solution might be to disable updates within the Comodo settings, and then start cfpupdat.exe using Windows scheduler instead. Provided one could send some input parameters to cfpupdat.exe making it not prompt (and preferably stay invisible). And since the updater isn’t visible when it annyoyingly grabs the attention, it seems to me such possibilites might exist?
Meanwhile, I see only one solution: Use Comodo as a pure firewall and something else for antivirus (comodo is a great firewall but there are better AVs), and disable updates (after you’ve run all your PC programs with Comodo in safe mode, to get a full and updated rules set). Because as you all know the frequency of updates needed for a pure firewall is… years really. You only need an update if there’s a change in IP protocol or a bug found in Comodo. The only drawback with disabling updates this way is that it will not automatically recognize updated applications, so for example next time Firefox gets updated, you will be probably prompted by Comodo to accept it. Which might cause some annoyance but probably less than the minimizing of media players.