At boot, the Comodo firewall seems to inhibit some startup tasks from running, especially if they try to install themselves in the taskbar to the right after CFP has come up in the taskbar.
I verify that this is a Comodo issue because everything came up just fine when I was just running Windows Firewall. It is also an ongoing bug that has been around for at least all of version 3.0.
I have also verified that there are no events that take place that would prevent these tasks from running; at least, there are no Defense+ events.
I am running as Firewall highest alert level, Custom Policies; Defense+ paranoid mode.
The number of tasks and which ones are prevented from running is a bit random showing that this is, indeed, a timing issue.
This happens no matter what type of user is logging in, administrative or limited.
Yes, Windows firewall and running a limited user which should give me most of the protection I need except for custom pings to and from the DSL router. Windows firewall worked just fine; all the icons came up in the taskbar and fast.
Sunbelt’s latest travesty also worked better than Comodo in this respect, showing most of the icons if not all, most of the time.
But, I just found that all of this is really moot; you see, the problem with the logout and log back in is still here.
Basically, it sits at the welcome screen for a loooooong time while trying to log on, no disk activity, then it comes up without explorer or cfp.exe.
Hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL gives me the task manager. Executing first cfp.exe and then explorer.exe in that order gives me all of the applications and icons in the task bar.
Only problem I am seeing now aside from one application failing to come up sometimes is that Yahoo Messenger cuts out and goes back to the login screen.
All of this happens without any log messages so it is impossible to see what the problem is.
cfp.exe seems to be failing and the resident cmdagent.exe fails in safe mode. The failure of cfp.exe is also without any error messages.
Really really bad news, since my wife who is about as non-techie as you can get needs to use this computer first and trying to tell her the absolutely ridiculous process I have to go through to get a working system is a no-go from square one.
Mark both issues as probably [FIXED], for me anyway, in 3.0.21.329. Interesting that nothing is in the change log about this. A phantom fix? Or do I still have a problem?
This is with “Block all the unknown requests if the application is closed” DISABLED (unchecked). I don’t know if I want to test it to see if it will still work if it is checked.
The failure of CFP.exe to come up on login seems to be fixed unconditionally except for the above exception.
Half of my login startup applications FAILED TO RUN WITH NO LOGGING AT ALL, either in the Firewall or the D+ logs. This is a BUG and should be fixed. If an application is refused access to run, the reasons must be logged unconditionally (unless you want to put another configuration option to not log such events).
I was able to get all of my startup applications to finally run on login after running all the ones that did not come up by hand and handling the alerts, one by one. Getting better, guys, but still a bit of a way off from being ready for prime-time.
There is a known problem with Windows XP itself, in which having too many autostart apps starting at the same time will cause some tray icons to not appear, although the processes are in memory. Having Comodo Firewall on your system may make the problem worse; it did for me anyway. The solution to this is to use a startup manager. I use the freeware StartRight. It fixed the problem for me.
Yes, there is also a patch for it, especially if you are running the Language bar. I have this installed and it works just fine with Windows firewall. Again, this seems to have been fixed in this latest release. Why no changelog entries? A fix of a fix? Or is this still an issue and I just got lucky?
In any case, I have 13 taskbar icons including Comodo, and the errant processes had been stopped completely and were not executing at all.
Again, this resolved itself when I managed to execute all of the terminated processes by hand and was able to answer all of the alerts. As stated before, these processes were blocked from starting with NO log messages, either in the Firewall or D+ logs; quite irritating until I figured it out. Do you honestly think that a simple non-techie Windows user would be able to deal with something like this, even if the reasons for stopping a process from running were logged?