problems .... [Solved]

Bug Reports - CSE
1

Hey, I’m writing this in somebody’s else’s name as he has no time …

INFO

Hello:

It is with great frustration that I post this message. In the past two weeks, I have been it seems (for lack of a better way to describe it), at war with COMODO products.

Following a July 9th Microsoft auto-update (those who had installed ZoneAlarm as their firewall), may have lost connectivity to the net. Of course, this is a known issue now, and Check Point has introduced an update. At the time, I uninstalled ZoneAlarm, which I had not been using extensively anyway, to try Comodo’s CFP.

Also at the time, I installed the BOClean and the SecureEmail products as well. It can only said that after install, my disk use went-up by 100% at least. Not only that, as a Mozilla - Thunderbird user, my client was left useless; every time I attempted to open Thunderbird to connect and retrieve email (POP or IMAP), the client would immediately crash. In checking for known or rising Thunderbird issues, I found there to be none outstanding with such a lead-in.

Finally, figured out that Comodo products were doing this, and began to uninstall products, one at a time. Regained my email functionality finally, only to realize that Comodo left a whole bunch of back-wash/crud/left-over hooks in the registry, which did not get taken out during uninstall.

Subsequently, I attempted to remove COMODO specific registry entries with the hope that this will cure it; only to realize that my net functionality was placed out of commission as a consequence. Apparently, removing the COMODO SecureEmail registry hooks tears-apart the .net framework somehow.

I cannot say now how this is happening but, there seems to be no end in sight at this point.

I wonder how others have completely rid their systems of these hooks!

I am looking to gain some insight into what the experience of others may be in this area.

Below, I am including a couple of screen-shots of what I see in the registry, in relationship to this problem, and also what those registry entries seem to be doing in terms of running processes.

My operating system is XP - SP3/32 bit. Using Avast Anti-Virus and Spybot S&D.

I hope somebody can help him out, you can see what we’ve tried here

Xan

2

Hi The Ox

I’m sorry to hear you had some thunderbird problems when you installed Comodo SecureEmail. Our deepest apologies for the problems you have encountered.

It seems also that for a reason we do not yet know, that you have had a failed uninstall also, possible due to a incorrect network registry configuration.

Btw - I am in the UK so differences in timezones do apply.

Neither of these issues appeared in our testing and beta testing or in our many other users. As you can imagine it is not theoretically possible to simulate the environment of each and every desktop PC no matter how hard we try to simulate the real world environment. Real world PCs can have any number of applications installed and uninstalled over a long period of time and even though we follow all the rules, unfortunately some problems can occur for a few users. This does not however mean we will not try to resolve your problems, quite the opposite, we’ll put 100% effort into finding and fixing the problem you encountered with the software (if you wish) and/or correcting your existing issue. I’ve ask a developer to contact you regarding this.

Comodo SecureEmail is a one size fits all solution for POP/SMTP/IMAP. To support as many e-mail clients as possible Comodo SecureEmail uses Microsoft’s Winsock 2 Layered Service Provider Interface (not a hook, but a standard network stack extension system used in the windows network stack for a long time now) and encrypt/signs/decrypts e-mails at the network level, rather than a specific client plug-in, which limits the user of Comodo SecureEmail to only a very very few e-mail clients. If you wish to understand more about Layered Service Providers please see this article: (http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0599/LayeredService/LayeredService.aspx)

Many other third party organisations also use LSPs to execute network stack monitoring (such as Antivirus or Antispam) to intercept and analyse data on a global application basis. Simply deleting an LSP from a network (by deleting registry entries) may result in an unstable system which will probably crash and should not be carried out under any circumstances.

Sometimes if one previous LSP has been removed incorrectly, for example by a spyware registry cleaner such as Spybot –which I notice you have- the correct links for LSPs up and down the chain may be broken and/or the registry may not be in a corrupt or correct state. Spyware applications often remove programs in a brutal manner and do not put back correct linkages which can leave a system unstable. The installation of subsequent LSPs may result in an unstable network system.

It is possible to restore you Winsock2 configuration fairly simply, however if other applications such as Anti-virus and Anti-Spyware are installed and use an LSP you may need to re-install them in order for them to work correctly. Please see the following article.

  • WARNING: Care should be taken when editing the registry manually, please read the Microsoft instructions fully before fixing Winsock2.

“How to determine and to recover from Winsock2 corruption in Windows Server 2003, in Windows XP, and in Windows Vista”

The crux of the article is to execute the following at a command prompt and reboot:

netsh winsock reset

I sincerely hope this solves your problems. If you need more assistance, please post again and we’ll endeavour to assist.

Kind Regards,
Shane. :SMLR

3

I will close this one since it is a duplicate & The Ox has responded to the other one, with good results! :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Josh