Hi guys!
I have been reading through the forum and general internet about an issue I started to have all of the sudden last week. I was using NOD32 Antivirus version 8.something updated with the latest virus definitions. One day I noticed that the Eset icon is no longer in my tray and I thought that maybe I made a change and the antivirus was not at startup. So I attempted to manually start it. Of course nothing happened. I tried few more things, adding a shortcut in shel:startup, uninstalling and reinstalling and nothing changed.
To give you some context, I am living in Germany and last week one of my colleagues managed to get infected with the infamous Petya ransomware (the irony is that this happened on the world's backup day ...pretty funny but painful for my colleague who lost everything and had to replace the hdd). His mishap opened my eyes that I should ensure I am well protected. I am normally using Eset Nod32 as antivirus (and I am very happy with it since 5-6 years already), Malwarebytes and ADW cleaner so until now I did not have any issues. However because of this ransomware being very new and very dangerous, I decided to find an anti-ransomware software and installed one called WinAntiRansom which seemed ok.
A couple of days after installing this new software I started having issues with Eset AV. So not sure if they are connected but they could be..Anyway, sorry for the long bracket...basically since last week I upgraded Nod32 to version 9. uninstalled it and reinstalled it a few times ad finally yesterday I had my nice GUI back Today however it is gone again. This is not a huge issue because I see that ekrn.exe is running in the background so I am protected but it is annoying not to be able to use the interface in case you want to run spot checks or enable gamer mode .
I also tried to install the log collector but I have to say I lost my patience after 40 minutes as the software seemed to not move past a specific step and it made me a bit crazy. Also I should mention that briefly when restarting my laptop after a fresh install of Eset I saw an error message stating that egui.exe cannot start because a dll was missing. The DLL in question is sciter-x.dll so I tried also downloading from some place and placing it in the system32 folder but to no avail.
So i am coming back to you asking for your help please. I have raised also a ticket with the Eset support team last week but no response until now (they did say it may take up to 7 working days to reply so we're still in the timeframe but I would like to ask for your help as you may have been in the same situation and perhaps already have an idea of what to do next).
Some quick specs: Windows 10 Pro, Nod32 v 9 (latest version). Currently if I check the status of the 2 services related to Eset I can see that ekrn.exe is running while egui.exe is suspended.
Any advice you may have is much appreciated! Thank you! Fuel