MS Office 2003 causes Cmdagent.exe to use 100% CPU [merged topic]

[Citizen_K]

Merged.

[L.A.R_Grizzly]

@EricJH post:13

Merged.

Thanks for the merge, EricJH. Hopefully, the devs will notice and find the problem.

[Surfinusa]

@EricJH post:13

Merged.

So have we found any common issues here that you guys can address?

I am still using Comodo just for firewall though and MSE for anti-virus until Comodo fix comes out for MS Office 2003 issue.

[L.A.R_Grizzly]

Boy, I hope the devs can fix this soon. I opened a Word document today and it took over a minute before I could use my computer! Opening many programs now (including MS FrontPage, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Reader, Scansoft PaperPort), really slows down my machine. Disabling CAV cures the problem. I also find no difference between On Access and Stateful settings. This really needs attention!

DB: 3648

[pt1158]

@L.A.R. Grizzly post:16

Boy, I hope the devs can fix this soon. I opened a Word document today and it took over a minute before I could use my computer! Opening many programs now, really slows down my machine. Disabling CAV cures the problem. I also find no difference between On Access and Stateful settings. This really needs attention!

DB: 3648

Yeah, same here. It seemed to go a bit better a few days ago, but the last 2 or 3 DB updates have really clobbered it again. I still can’t track down which office 2k3 file(s) are casuing the iAV scanning issue.

[Citizen_K]

@umesh post:59

Hi,
We have both CISV4 BETA and CISV3 in development, so things are getting delayed. We are hopeful for this week but fingers crossed.

Thanks
-umesh

May be this brings some solace. Let’s wait and see.

[L.A.R_Grizzly]

@EricJH post:18

May be this brings some solace. Let’s wait and see.

I hope so, I need the relief! :-\

[Citizen_K]

There are several reports about CPU choking (for no apparent reason). I am not suffering from locks ups that seem to have no reason.

On my system with older hardware it tends to choke Explorer when opening a folder with lots of files like system 32 or my folder with software downloads (installers and archives are quite a challenge for AV’s; not just for Comodo; I have seen it happen with AVG 8.x and 9.x).

I noticed that changing the AV from Stateful to on access makes things manageable. The CPU usage is high but doesn’t choke navigation in Explorer anymore.

It looks like stateful inspection is playing a role. Who of you has set the AV to Stateful? Can you see what happens when you change the AV setting to On access?

[L.A.R_Grizzly]

@EricJH post:20

There are several reports about CPU choking (for no apparent reason). I am not suffering from locks ups that seem to have no reason.

On my system with older hardware it tends to choke Explorer when opening a folder with lots of files like system 32 or my folder with software downloads (installers and archives are quite a challenge for AV’s; not just for Comodo; I have seen it happen with AVG 8.x and 9.x).

I noticed that changing the AV from Stateful to on access makes things manageable. The CPU usage is high but doesn’t choke navigation in Explorer anymore.

It looks like stateful inspection is playing a role. Who of you has set the AV to Stateful? Can you see what happens when you change the AV setting to On access?

https://forums.comodo.com/feedbackcommentsannouncementsnews-cis/av-scanner-slow-t50456.0.html;msg360960#msg360960

I’m not experiencing choking problems when accessing folders. My problem is related to very slow program startups, whether opening the program directly or by opening a saved file.

[HeffeD]

@EricJH post:20

It looks like stateful inspection is playing a role. Who of you has set the AV to Stateful? Can you see what happens when you change the AV setting to On access?

My AV was set to stateful.

I didn’t experience any slowness with Explorer or slow application startups, I just had cmdagent.exe tasking my CPU to 100% on startup. (Which is odd, because I have a dual core processor. Comodo isn’t designed to take advantage of multiple processors, so I’m not sure why it’s knocking out both cores…) This causes the startup to last upwards of 15 minutes, which is just unacceptable. After it calms down though, things operated as they should.

I did try switching to on-access as a troubleshooting step when the slowdown was occurring and didn’t see any difference. Neither with switching to disabled.

After reading your post though, I realized I hadn’t tried a reboot with the AV set to on-access. (Set to disabled allows the machine to boot as normal) So I reinstalled the AV to try that. Cmdagent.exe still hammers away at my CPU on startup when set to on-access, so stateful file inspection doesn’t seem to have any bearing on my problem.

Here is the timeline of when CIS (The AV anyway…) starts to affect my system.

• Complete uninstall of CIS using Revo Uninstaller and Ragwings .bat file. Manually delete sfi.dat. (Why doesn’t the uninstaller remove this? 88) )
• Reinstall CIS. (I subscribe to Threatcast, but never install hopsurf, etc…)
• Manually update virus database initially, reboot. (Cmdagent.exe is just fine at this point)
• CIS always says “Never Updated” after reboot, so we wait until automatic update fixes this status.

Any further startups after the first automatic update are plagued with cmdagent.exe hogging all the CPU cycles.

Note that this behavior only started with the update to 3.13.xxxx.581. Prior to that, the only problem I had was excessive disk I/O during updates that would lock up my system, but not due to excessive CPU usage. That behavior started with version 3.12. All prior versions back to 3.4 ran perfectly on my system.

[Whoop-dee-doo]

I can confirm this issue: my computer slows down (almost to a halt) when opening word 2002, excel 2002, IE tabs, and some folders when the Comodo AV is enabled (stateful or on access). As soon as I turn off AV, the computer speeds along just fine. What’s the deal?

XP home SP3 32 bit
CIS 3.13.126709.581
Superantispyware real time
Microscoft office 2002 SP3

[layman]

I also confirm this CPU clogging with MS Office 2003

XP SP3 32 bit
CIS latest version
no other realtime security software

[hanslama]

Same here. Office 2003. Windows XP SP3
I added excel, word to exclusion list and it runs instantly.
Come on Comodo team, wake up. AV developing team has been on drugs last month or what? I didn’t have any issues whatsoever before that. But now ???

[Pawpawsaurus]

I have my AV Security Level set to Stateful, and am experiencing similar problems opening some applications, but not all. The most annoying ones (because I use them often) are:

Word 2003
Outlook 2003
Paint Shop Pro 7.4
PDF-XChange Viewer 2.0 (build 42.2)
[Strangely, Excel 2003 opens very quickly for me]

The only way I’ve found of getting any of these to open at a reasonable speed is to set my AV Security to Disabled. The applications seem to be scanned regardless of whatever other configuration changes I make.

I downgraded yesterday evening to CIS 3.12.111745.560, and went to bed happy that the problem was temporarily resolved, but this morning I foolishly responded to the CIS upgrade prompt and the symptoms have reappeared.

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.21GHz
1Gb Ram
WinXP Home SP3 32 bit
CIS 3.13.126709.581

[HeffeD]

@HeffeD post:22

Note that this behavior only started with the update to 3.13.xxxx.581. Prior to that, the only problem I had was excessive disk I/O during updates that would lock up my system, but not due to excessive CPU usage. That behavior started with version 3.12. All prior versions back to 3.4 ran perfectly on my system.

On reflection, it looks like it was sheer coincidence that I happened to update to .581 on the same day the bad virus database was released. So the problem doesn’t appear to be the .581 that is causing my problems, but the virus database.

Weren’t measures instituted last time this happened to ensure this didn’t happen again?

[hanslama]

I’ve just disabled an AV. Everything is so sluggish. Not only Office 2003. Media player classic, OneNote 2007 and I didn’t have patience to try something else. >:(

[Citizen_K]

@EricJH

For what it is worth here are my experiences on XP.

I don’t get the problems with Win 7 v4 beta. But I am currently on XP with v 3.13 and there are some problems there.

Installers stall in the process; MSI installers seem a bit more prone. I updated to the latest Firefox and it took 3 minutes after closing the installer to start Firefox. Explorer screens stalled sometimtes. In the stalling process shortcuts could not be clicked. Like a user described earlier today part of the shortcut icons at the desktop did not get drawn until after 3-4 minutes or so.

One of the first things installed was that IE update that was released today. Hope that is not interfering… 88)

Heffe, if I recall correctly you are using Win 7? If so then it is not platform dependant. Most reports seem to be on the XP platform. It doesn’t seem to happen with v4 as far as my current insights go.

[HeffeD]

@EricJH post:29

Heffe, if I recall correctly you are using Win 7? If so then it is not platform dependant. Most reports seem to be on the XP platform. It doesn’t seem to happen with v4 as far as my current insights go.

No, I’m running XP Pro, just recently upgraded to SP3. Recently as in yesterday. I finally bit the bullet and decided to install SP3 to see if it had any impact on CAV bogging the system down. It didn’t have any noticeable effect.

[patrice58]

@Dch48 post:8

The stateful scanning only works until the AV database is updated, then it resets. Given the fequency of the updates, stateful mode is of limited benefit.

Every half hour = almost no benefit what so ever :-TD but on the other hand it’s great the database is updated so often :-TU

[AeoniAn]

■■■■, I hate uninstalling CAV. But it seems the only way to go with a lot of UN-RARed folders with jpg’s inside. Not to mention MPC-HC’s 30 sec to come up, and ACAD delay’s…
I’m really really very sad.
Hopefully I still have 2 months of Avira’s sig’s. I hope this time will be enough…

(:SAD) :‘( :’( :‘( :’(