(:AGY) nothing in life is free…After being prodded by senior execs of the company to use its free firewall and anti-virus software and being pointed to industry media links giving these products kudos…i had opportunity to install both apps after experiencing a hard drive implosion on my laptop…in course of going through the 3 hour process of installing new hard drive and reinstalling OS and all personal configurations for the 3 users that share the laptop…i installed the firewall and anti-virus Comodo products…Great for 3 days…but noticed that Microsoft doesn’t ‘recognize’ the Comdo anti-virus app…and i kept getting warning messages… No big deal…But when attempting to log in on the 3rd day…this hal.dll booting problem appeared…have since spent 4 hours (so far) on phone with Dell support…discovering that hard drive files got corrupted…and only to finally determine that the OS needs to be wiped out, and I need to start all over again…about a day’s worth of reconfiguring, and customizing each user’s settings the way they were…not to mention losing all the email related data from last 3 days…In the course of my frustration, Comodo CEO Melih sends me an email saying “its a known problem” and points me to this URL…where I see postings back to July…Its the end of September now…Terribly odd that company would still be promoting its software with a known flaw that causes extensive damage, requiring some people totally reinstall OS… so much for free software…sort of scary to think what the software that one pays for is like.
I most certainly understand your frustration, but you should have paid better attention to the fact that the Comodo download page DOES say that the AV is BETA. I don’t think I need to lecture you on not using beta software in a production enviroment…
And if you downloaded it from someplace like softpedia.com then that was a no-no to begin with. :o
As of note, I’d recommend using only their Firewall for now until a FINAL version of the AV comes out. The HAL.DLL problem is specific to the AV ONLY.
Currently I’m using Avast 4.7 along with Comodo Personal Firewall and they work great together. No problem what so ever on either my PCs or my clients’.
Edward
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386
This also holds a copy of the hal.dll, along with other system files from the origanal install of win XP i think.
cheers, rotty
Hi,
I’d like to share some of my experiences working with comodo AV and hompe that those experiences help comodo team to find out what’s causing this hal.dll problem… I’ve tried out comodo AV on 5 different computers… On 4 of them I had hal.dll problem, but the 5th computer (laptop) worked fine with AV for 2 months, then I uninstalled it (didn’t want to have the hal’dll problem 
). Now the story about the rest 4 computers. 1st computer - was a production computer and was in intensive use. Programing, mailing, web browsing, etc. Comod AV worked fine for about 3 months. There was even a sheduled job every night to scan the whole system. Not a single problem (well - maybe a little one - when comodo AV used to update itself it used to use 90% of procesor). But one day I’ve decided to enable comodo AV in thunderbird (there is an option “Allow anti-virus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages”). When I enabled that function my created thunderbird rules stoped working. Then I turned off that function. Thunderbird rules worked again But maybe 15 minutes after that I had tried to lauch calculator, the system had complained that there was no calculator, then i tried to lauch some other program, but the system complained once more. So I restarted pc. And here you go - hal.dll problem. I’ve tried the restore method - it didn’t work. So I reinstalled the pc. The 2nd pc story - it spewed out the hal.dll problem only 3 days after comodo AV was installed. The 3rd pc story - I won’t tell all the story how it died, but I will tell what problems we had after we restored the pc. We reinstalled that pc after the hal.dll problem. After reinstall it worked very slowly. Then we defragmented that pc’s hdd. That was the solution - the pc works well now. And the 4th pc story - the same as the 3rd pc’s - we had to defragment that pc’s hdd.
So, I hope this info will help comodo team to find out what’s causing this problem, because if they will release beta 2 version without knowing what’s causing the hal.dll problem and will just hope that the beta 2 version will resolve the problem just by itself - I (and a lot of people out there) will never use comodo AV. So I hope comodo team will post the reason causing the problem as soon as they will find out. I wish comodo team best of luck and I realy like their firewall (although it needs a few tweakings too )
I still can’t see the beta word on that site… anyway I’ve just read this topic for the first time, about the hal.dll problem only been noticed after screensaver and diferent login I think that that doesn’t mean anything. If the first session had hal.dll still loaded in memory only a diferent session would notice the file been missing. so what I’m trying to say based on the other reports is that this maybe some kind of incompability with anything that other program is doing to the hal.dll… maybe somekind of access diferent from the usual one that could be detected has malicious access if cavs wasn’t ready to deal with it. and one only notices after rebooting. I haven’t experieced this problem, but I think that the answer for finding the source of this problem is to investigate what those programs (that and how windows works with hal.dll) are doing and not what cavs is doing because cavs may think that it’s doing the right thing and look like the right thing from the coders point of view (I’m a coder my self and I know how this feels ;))
Easy with hal.dll, its fairly small & yet vital Windows component. It is the Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer DLL library. AFAIK, Windows talks to all hardware through this DLL.
yes I know that but the only explanation I’ve come so far is that maybe it has something to do with how other programs are using it (and other missing files)…
I mean… is it possible that there is some way of using that library that some kind of access could make it look almost like a virus?
or can this also be a bug from windows it self?
maybe a report o programs known to be installed could help… after all hal is hardware abstraction layer i think that in theory every program uses it directly or indirectly… maybe there is something in comun in some of those programs that can shed some light on the issue
edit: a copy protection software named “StarForce” is knows to change the way that windows deals with hardware… don’t know exactly how
As I said in another topic, hal.dll either disappearing or becoming corrupt is not a new thing. It’s been happening for years and there are, unfortunately, a multitude of reasons for why happens (although I’ve never seen a definitive evidence of this). I suppose it could be called a Windows bug. But, I don’t think MS have owned up to it as such. Although they have acknowledged it as an issue. Since hal.dll is the pivot between the software & hardware, I think everything uses it (in-directly).
StarForce? Possible, StarForce creates weird virtual, non-existent, devices & has registry keys that are… for want of a better description… invalid.
I’ve been using Comodo for 1 week. Previous I was on Zone Alarm Security Suite. Had no problems, sweep with Ad-Aware every week or two.
A box came up this morning that said Comodo was “installing”. Since it was already installed, I clicked cancel after a second or two but it proceeded to continue and at the end said it was upgraded or some such.
After that an error about diagapp cannot access “comctl32.ocx” popped up in a Windows Warning screen a few times to which I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out and then ran a Comodo anti-virus scan and an ad-aware scan and rebooted. At reboot it immediately crashed and said 'missing hal.dll - replace to continue" or some such. Since I had a previous hard disk with windows on it (same original Microsoft CD) i simply hooked it up, booted and copied the hal.dll file to the problem directory (it wasn’t there in windows/system32/hal.dll) rebooted and then had to register with Microsoft which was another big hassle since unless the computer completely boots, the version I have of Hughes/DirecWay is not engaged. Anyway, since others are having the same problem I really don’t think there is any doubt that COMODO is responsible for this. This is the first thread I’ve read on it but now the annoying problem with the "comctl32.ocx file that diagapp is searching for is still popping up…
(:AGY)
update: all sorts of things don’t work now…printer ok but scanner isn’t. Dos doesn’t work and system restore doesn’t work and won’t let me create a current restore point. Most of the system seems to work and there is no pattern to what is missing. Diskcheck says all is well with the hard drive (which is relatively new).
Interestingly Zone Labs forum doesn’t have any posts regarding hal.dll so all the problems here have to be specific to Comodo. I have no choice but to uninstall it (if I can…).
first I don’t think I’ve ever said that it wasn’t cavs that was erasing the file… what I said was that I think that it was possible that the detection method whatever it is was identifing these file has dangerous for some kind of reason (i think i said possibly some kind of access that changes these files in anyway). once again unless the bug comes from the updating process I don’t see anything on your report that can help catch this bug.
anyone… was there any update on the night of 15th october???
beta 2 is to be released today 16th October… wierd that an update is released on 15th if theres is going to be a release on the next day… any way it is possible… I think…
you could have gone 1 full week witrh no update I guess
what are your system specifications??? what programs have you installed before rebooting?? what else have you done??
if you ever return I hope you answer these questions so we can better understand the problem
one last thing… just because you didn’t find this same problem your previous choise forum, doesn’t mean that it never happened or it is not going to happen. it just means that it is not a current issue
I will wait a while before I post any more comments
Thanks for reply.
Actually I installed the firewall a week ago and the a/v on Thursday. So it went to day 4 before throwing up. To answer your questions:
XP version 2002 SP2
AMD AThlon XP1800+
1.54 GHz, 256 MB Ram
twin 120GB drives each partitioned into 2 for a total of 4 virtual drives
All system files are on C:
no files seem to be gone other than files in system32 directory and apparently registry entries.
Lots of .ocx files and a few .dll files are missing.
After the install of Comodo A/V I don’t recall installing any programs.
Can’t really remember what I was doing when the Comodo installer came up but I think I was surfing. As I mentioned, I clicked “cancel” and it didn’t cancel. Immediately a “diagapp” warning came up missing some file or another and I turned my full attention to figuring out what that was all about. At that point I really don’t know what was deleted because I was more concerned about making certain I hadn’t had a virus. The system got extremely sluggish at that point, halting processing occasionally and then releasing. Comodo seemed to chug on with it’s a/v thing. I got all the way through C drive and a little into D drive before I aborted. My drives are all almost full so it would have taken too long to search the storage drives.
Uninstalling Comodo A/V took a long time.
I also uninstalled Comodo Firewall since it was always popping up and asking for permission for programs I already gave permission to - same as another thread here about a window over a window generating a Comodo permission box.
I downloaded Kaspersky since it caught a bunch of ■■■■ in a infestation I had on another computer a couple of years ago that all the other a/v’s missed but it wouldn’t install because of a missing .dll file that msiexec. wants to use.
Gotta go to work now so will continue with this later…