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ESET Smart Security causing false 0x00000124 BSODs?


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Good day,

 

Earlier today, my new (8-ish weeks old) computer suddenly crashed into a persistant BSOD whenever I boot. A bit of troubleshooting later, it turns out to be a BSOD code related to detection of general hardware problems.

Booting into safe mode (win7 64bit) worked fine, so I ran some general hardware checks and stresstests: no problems detected. Doing a clean boot also works fine. Ran more test, again no hardware issues detected.

Lastly, I tried booting my pc with more and more services enabled at start-up to see if I could figure out the culprit. Turns out it's ESET, much to my surprise I might add as I've never had any problems with ESET before.

 

Disabling the ESET service on boot makes the BSOD disappear and the system seems to run stable just fine. Enable it, and windows goes back to crashing into the 0x00000124 BSOD on boot.

Tried a full removal and re-install of ESET, but that didn't seem to help.

 

 

Any ideas? I've been using ESET for at least 4-5 years now, never had any issue with it whatsoever. No signs of any problems related to either software or hardware up until earlier today either.

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Have you tried installing this hotfix? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2664888

Should the problem persist, configure the system to generate complete memory dumps as per the instructions hxxp://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN380- section "I. Configure memory dump settings". After a crash, compress the memory dump, upload it to a safe location and pm me the download link.

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Thanks for the swift reply.

 

I have just installed the hotfix, unfortunately it did not help. However, something happened that might be of interest.

 

When I tried to re-enable normal startup in system configuration, it wouldn't let me and instead jumped back to selective startup with ESET disabled. Figuring a re-install of ESET would fix it, I tried uninstalling, but it wouldn't let me. The uninstaller hit a wall when it got to the registry entries, saying it cannot delete the keys as it doesn't have sufficient access to them.

Rebooting into safe mode let me properly uninstall, then on another reboot to regular mode, after installing it seems to update fine, but I get a "Communication with driver failed. HIPS is inactive" error, which I've never seen before.

 

I almost want to say that kind of behaviour reeks of a virus of sorts, but a thourough scan from Malwarebytes didn't pick anything up.

 

At any rate, I've compressed and uploaded the memory dump, a PM with the link should be in your inbox shortly.

 

Thanks again.

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I have had exactly the same problem today - BSOD 0x124 using Smart Security 8 on Win 7 x64. I've spent the past 6 hours troubleshooting it. Because that error is usually down to a random hardware fault, I've spent all day swapping out components trying to work out what it was, but nothing had any effect.

 

Then I got to thinking; the crash happened within a second of the desktop appearing, but I was able to use safe mode just fine. So, logic lead me to conclude that it was a service that was trying to start during normal startup. After disabling all of my services and re-enabling them all one-by-one, I found the culprit to be the ESET service.

 

Uninstalling Smart Security completely (using the ESET Uninstaller tool) allowed me to launch back into normal windows without BSOD. I tried to reinstall Smart Security, but I got another BSOD as soon as I rebooted. I'm at a loss as to what to do now.

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Hi,

6/21/15 @ 10:19 PM "Windows Update Failure3" (may be unrelated)

6/22/15 @ 1:35 AM  Blue Screen and auto-restart

6/22/15 @ 9:xx AM Logged in, blue screen, logged in again, started email program & downloaded emails, then blue screen.

Used Administrative Tools--System Configuration-- to disable all services and startup programs-no blue screen.

Tried to re-enable everything, no blue screen.

ESET Anti-Virus not able to be enabled in System Configuration and is not running, but the computer has no blue screens.

--Robert

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I have been getting the same thing on my PC. Last week, Wednesday, I started to BSoD about 5 minutes after my computer booted, but not when I used Safe Mode. I tried to get some help to interpret the minidmp files but everyone was busy. I ended up, on Friday, rebuilding the PC from scratch thinking it was a driver that was corrupted.

 

I finished the rebuild late Friday and the PC was fine the whole weekend. This morning I turned it on and the BSoD was back at the same 5 minute period. I went to a Windows 7 support forum and uploaded my last 4 minidmp files. The one thing they noticed was, every crash had the following in common:

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Debugging Details:
------------------

BUGCHECK_STR:  0x124_GenuineIntel

CUSTOMER_CRASH_COUNT:  1

DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID:  WIN7_DRIVER_FAULT

PROCESS_NAME:  ekrn.exe

CURRENT_IRQL:  f

ANALYSIS_VERSION: 6.3.9600.17336 (debuggers(dbg).150226-1500) amd64fre

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

They recommended I uninstall ESET and install Microsoft Security Essentials as a test. I did that and my PC has been running just fine for over an hour now.

 

I've had your software for over 3 years now, this is the first time you folks have screwed up.

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The fact that BSOD occurs with ESET installed doesn't necessarily mean that ESET is the culprit. We know of a handsome of Microsoft bugs that cause crash when properly designed ESET's drivers are loaded. Microsoft has already addressed several such issues. Let's refrain from making conclusions before the issue is thoroughly investigated by ESET's engineers and the actual culprit is found.

 

Do you have software from Gigabyte installed?

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(I have ESET NOD32 Antivirus but I noticed this current thread and describes my problems almost identically.)

 

I've been running ESET Anti Virus v7.x on Windows 8.1 Pro on my desktop for about a year and a half. (I had previously tried updating to v8.x, but it blocked some of my CableCARD tv tuner functions from working in WMC.) This is a custom built computer and has always been ROCK SOLID. Starting this evening, the system completely locks up with no BSoD or memory dump. This seems to happen between appox 3 and 10 minutes after logging into Windows. After this occurred a half dozen times, I tried disabling ESET's protection until next restart. (I got the red triangle warning in the system tray.) A few minutes later, I noticed the ESET system tray icon doing the blue circle spinning like it was trying to update and the system almost immediately froze. After restarting Windows, I uninstalled ESET and everything was fine. I did multiple restarts, used a number of apps, and it all appeared fine.

 

So I downloaded the latest version of ESET v8.x from ESET, installed it, and restarted my PC. Sure enough, after about 5 minutes, the computer froze. So now it's happened with both v7.x and v8.x. It doesn't happen when ESET is uninstalled.

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I have a Gigabyte Motherboard a Z97x-gaming 7 and when I disable eset from running the system is fine. But when ESET and its respective services are started it blue screens with 0x00000124.

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Would it be possible to try temporarily uninstalling Gigabyte sw and unnecessary drivers to see if it makes a difference? Couldn't it be that Gigabyte made an automatic update yesterday? At ESET we didn't release any modules yesterday that hadn't been distributed to millions of users before so it's likely that something else is causing this.

 

Update: It seems that Gigabyte has an application called APP Center which is capable of updating drivers and BIOS automatically. Did you notice it performing an automatic update yesterday? If the application has logs, are there some recent records of driver or BIOS updates?

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(I have ESET NOD32 Antivirus but I noticed this current thread and describes my problems almost identically.)

 

I've been running ESET Anti Virus v7.x on Windows 8.1 Pro on my desktop for about a year and a half. (I had previously tried updating to v8.x, but it blocked some of my CableCARD tv tuner functions from working in WMC.) This is a custom built computer and has always been ROCK SOLID. Starting this evening, the system completely locks up with no BSoD or memory dump. This seems to happen between appox 3 and 10 minutes after logging into Windows. After this occurred a half dozen times, I tried disabling ESET's protection until next restart. (I got the red triangle warning in the system tray.) A few minutes later, I noticed the ESET system tray icon doing the blue circle spinning like it was trying to update and the system almost immediately froze. After restarting Windows, I uninstalled ESET and everything was fine. I did multiple restarts, used a number of apps, and it all appeared fine.

 

So I downloaded the latest version of ESET v8.x from ESET, installed it, and restarted my PC. Sure enough, after about 5 minutes, the computer froze. So now it's happened with both v7.x and v8.x. It doesn't happen when ESET is uninstalled.

 

I have the same story - NOD32 AV, Win7 64-bit, on a custom box (ASUS z78-pro, i7) I built about 6 months ago.  Rock solid for all six months until Sunday night when the BSOD happened.  Uninstalled (or disabled the service) ESET AV 8 and bingo, BSODs are gone.

Edited by grinr
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Well, this is interesting. I just uninstalled all GIGABYTE related software... and suddenly ESET works without causing BSODs on boot. I didn't have any of the GIGABYTE apps set to auto-run, let alone auto-update however, so how in the world it managed to mess with the system while it worked fine for months, I wouldn't be able to tell you.

 

Of course, I have no idea whether things will stay stable over the rest of the day, but it looks promising at least. I'll do some stress testing and report on how things went.

Edited by Henduluin
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To check what options APP Center offers, I installed it on a vanilla Win7 system on VM, ie no ESET product was installed. Right after installation it offered an update to a newer version which I did. After the update, I got BSOD with a Gigabyte driver listed as the culprit. Of course, it was a VM so this BSOD may not be connected to what you are seeing but it says something about the quality of their drivers.

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1.option:

safe mode, services, disable eset

Run normal mode and everything is OK

 

2.option:

safe mode, uninstall App center

Run normal mode and everything is OK

Edited by František F
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To check what options APP Center offers, I installed it on a vanilla Win7 system on VM, ie no ESET product was installed. Right after installation it offered an update to a newer version which I did. After the update, I got BSOD with a Gigabyte driver listed as the culprit. Of course, it was a VM so this BSOD may not be connected to what you are seeing but it says something about the quality of their drivers.

 

Odd. Like I said, I shouldn't have gotten any updates from them as I turned off auto-update. Their latest BIOS update is from last year, too.

Still, it seems to have been the culprit. Ran my system through some tests and played a few different games to see what would happen, but everything seems back to normal. CPU/GPU/RAM loads are fine, temperatures are well within normal range... I guess that settles it, then. Wonder if I should send a message to gigabyte about this, or whether that's even worth it. I personally pretty much never used the software anyway.

 

At any rate, thank you Marcos. Should I mark this as solved, or leave it open and report back in after a few days, just in case?

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At any rate, thank you Marcos. Should I mark this as solved, or leave it open and report back in after a few days, just in case?

 

You can leave this topic open as we are still investigating what actually causes BSOD and temporarily uninstalling APP Center is just an interim workaround. We are trying to reproduce the issue and also have contacted Gigabyte on this matter.

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I just removed the Gigabyte App Center and reinstalled Smart Security 8 and it all seems to be working fine now. Why would this issue suddenly appear though? The Gigabye App Center has been on my system for 9 months, and I haven't updated it since I installed it, so for it to suddenly cause an issue is very odd.

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I suspect Gigabyte is pushing WIN 10 updates.

 

I also have a GigaByte MB and have had zip problems w/ESET. I also don't have App Center installed.

 

I did install a WIN 7 update yesterday for AMD SMBus driver. Turns out a lot of these WIN 7 hardware drivers are just "null" drivers. Also suspect this driver update originated with AMD and not Gigabyte.

 

My advice is turn off any auto updating of motherboard drivers until you install/upgrade to WIN 10.

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Thanks for the swift reply.

 

I have just installed the hotfix, unfortunately it did not help. However, something happened that might be of interest.

 

When I tried to re-enable normal startup in system configuration, it wouldn't let me and instead jumped back to selective startup with ESET disabled. Figuring a re-install of ESET would fix it, I tried uninstalling, but it wouldn't let me. The uninstaller hit a wall when it got to the registry entries, saying it cannot delete the keys as it doesn't have sufficient access to them.

Rebooting into safe mode let me properly uninstall, then on another reboot to regular mode, after installing it seems to update fine, but I get a "Communication with driver failed. HIPS is inactive" error, which I've never seen before.

 

I almost want to say that kind of behaviour reeks of a virus of sorts, but a thourough scan from Malwarebytes didn't pick anything up.

 

At any rate, I've compressed and uploaded the memory dump, a PM with the link should be in your inbox shortly.

 

Thanks again.

hi there ,

i have exact the same issue .. i spent about a day to realize there was not any faulty hardware . Eset smart security 7 seems to be responsible for my BSOD ..

My only gigabyte hardware is my 980gtx but drivers are nvidia's and i haven't installed any software of this company .

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We're going to contact Gigabyte and ASUS as it turned out the issue is not caused by ESET (we were performing standard process read and memory freeing operations when BSOD occurred). I've been trying to reproduce the issue on a system with a Haswell CPU to no avail though.

As an interim solution, we recommend uninstalling APP Center (Gigabyte) and AI Suite (ASUS) and also encourage you to contact the appropriate vendor of your motherboard.

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I just removed the Gigabyte App and reinstalled ESET and it is still failing. Almost a solution I guess.

 

I7 4970k

16 GB Memory

GTX 770

Windows 7

Edited by UTKeitaro
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I just removed the Gigabyte App and reinstalled ESET and it is still failing. Almost a solution I guess.

 

I7 4970k

16 GB Memory

GTX 770

Windows 7

 

Please provide a current memory dump so that we analyze it and determine the cause of the crash.

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