Hello Again,
I've had a recurrence of almost the same problem(s) that I posted on 6/2/09. I apologize for not marking that thread here, but I'm not sure how to do that. Ultimately, the issue appeared to be solved with the help of two very qualified people who contribute to this forum.
Unfortunately my problem returned last night. It is unfortunate that I returned home from work and was quite tired when I checked the main UI of NIS 2009. Had I been "fresher", I would have written everything down to properly document what occurred - but I did not.
The first thing I noticed was that my definitions showed 2 days ago - it usually shows only several minutes old at most. It stated the last definition check was on 6/8. I knew where this was going from previous issues, so I clicked on the CPU link to see what ran and when. Sure enough, both pulse updates and the automatic updates ran that same day - 6/10. So there's the first problem.
This "seems" to be linked to the next visual clue. My idle quick scan showed running on 6/8 and was highlighted in yellow - again, this never happens - the quick scan runs in a minute or so and then completes - again something is wrong there.
The resolution to this problem from my 6/2 post was to do a proper uninstall with the NRT (ran twice) - clean out any leftovers manually, then do a fresh install of 16.5.0.135 - then running live updates until everything was up to date. A day or so after doing that I manually ran a full system scan since NIS didn't do it by itself after the fresh install. The next visual clue was that under the CPU, the idle full system scan showed "never ran" (though it was probably less than 7 days since my manual scan) - but it too was highlighted in yellow - which should not have been the case.
One click support told me that it could not fix the problem (no error code). Running live update twice did update definitions, but on the main UI, it still said 2 days old. Being tired, I just thought I'd reboot and see if things refreshed. That's when ccSvcHst stopped responding and I had to end task to finish the reboot. My fault for not writing things down as I proceeded, but the bottom line was that somewhere things straightened out and I noticed that the scans were no longer highlighted, idle quick scan showed it had run, and on the main UI, it showed definitions only minutes old.
I did check my event viewer to see if there were any errors there, but there were none covering the dates from 6/7 through 6/10 - no application hangs or anything else.
Before I could proceed further, NIS started doing an idle full system scan - which I did not want to interrupt. It was getting late so I called it a night. This morning everything was as it should be and the idle full system scan did complete and found only one tracking cookie.
Again, I apologize for not being more professional in writing down exactly what I did and in what sequence - that puts those of you who would help me at a disadvantage.
However, since I had done that proper uninstall and reinstall on 6/2 - and NIS worked fine until 6/8 (or 6/10), I'm hoping that you folks could once more offer me some advice on how to proceed - or what to look for. I don't have a problem right now, but I'm concerned that these issues will return again some days in the future.
I don't want to unfairly complain, knowing that millions of other users do not have this problem - but for a product that was designed as a "set it and forget it" security app for those less knowledgeable about computers, this product does indeed need to be periodically checked for "abnormalities" - seeing as it does not notify the user in any way that something is amiss - unless one goes looking into things.
I would appreciate any help or advice, comments or questions, that you folks can give me that may help me to troubleshoot this intermittent issue.
Thank you.