Odd things happening including non shutdown last night

[DennisD]

Last night, the computer hung while shutting down, and had to do a hard shutdown with the on/off button.

 

Immediately after, it rebooted up to the desktop, almost completed booting, and then froze completely.

 

Had to hard shutdown again.

 

Booted into safe mode fine, but couldn't for the life of me work out what the cause was. Hadn't installed any programs or updated any drivers. For want of anything better I ran a number of dial-a-fix routines, and thought I might install an Erunt registry back-up, although I tried rebooting after dial-a-fix first.

 

Rebooted fine, and been ok all today, except for an unusual result running SIW.

 

Received the following error messages as SIW was launching:

 

 

 

 

 

The last one is a puzzler, as there is no virtual machine that I'm aware of running. Definitely no Returnil or PowerShadow. I've used this SIW before without these error messages.

 

The only difference since I last ran SIW is Online Armor Firewall, instead of Windows Firewall.

 

Any input would be welcome.

[CeeCee]

Can Online Armor Firewall be the cause?

[hazelnut]

I got the virtual machine and unknown windows kernel with OA when I first ran SIW.

 

Just left-click to highlight SIW in the OA programs list, and then right-click and select trusted.

 

No more popups?

[DennisD]

Thanks chaps, you're both right.

 

Tried that Hazel, the middle two error messages above are now gone, but although SIW is now "trusted", I'm still getting "Unknown Windows Kernel", and "A virtual machine (like) is running".

 

It's still definitely Online Armor causing this. Disabled Online and SIW ran without the pop-ups.

 

I can live without SIW, but I hate puzzles. I'll have a look around, see what I can find, although I'd be happy for any more suggestions.

 

EDIT: Rebooted a couple of times, made no difference.

[hazelnut]

Other OA users had this also, although it makes no diffence to the running of SIW Dennis.

[DennisD]

Thanks Hazel, as long as there's nothing untoward with that kernel mention, I can happily live with that.

 

It isn't very often we have to run these things anyway.