Hello, Microsoft.

I downloaded and installed Microsoft's latest foray into trying to protect their home users from their own poorly thought out legacy decisions, Microsoft Security Essentials, and I'm in the midst of trying it out on Firestorm, the Windows XP-powered Averatec 3200 I bought as what's still the single worst purchase decision I ever made.

So far, it works, but it has one bug and one showstopping problem on some systems, and Firestorm was one of them.

The bug is that, on login, Windows Security Center reports that Microsoft Security Essentials is turned off.  MSE reports the same, according to the user interface, because the Microsoft Security Essentials service isn't running.  The service starts shortly after login, but a security application needs to start at start-up, before a user is permitted to log in.  MSE's service starts so late that most other start-up items (including uTorrent, AVG Link Scanner, and Windows Desktop Search) are already fully operational before MSE's service starts.

The showstopper, however, is that Microsoft Security Essentials can get stuck in an endless loop, consuming every available CPU cycle, as the processes msseces.exe and explorer.exe spin around.  The entire system lags, there's often no MSE icon in the system tray, and when started from the desktop icon or Start Menu, MSE's user interface never displays.

You know about this, Microsoft, and the problem is more widespread than you want to realize.

You know about this showstopping bug, and you haven't released a fix for it yet.  You haven't even offered a workaround for it.

Well, I have a workaround for you, besides the obvious answer of not using Microsoft products.

The workaround is to do things the Microsoft way instead of the sensible way.  The workaround is to uninstall MSE, reboot, reinstall MSE, reboot again, and pray it works.  If it doesn't, then lather, rinse, and repeat.

It shouldn't have to be this way, but then, the Microsoft way of doing things is often a synonym for the wrong way of doing things.

All the best,

ArielMT.