MSE hangs on startup...

No idea what caused this all of a sudden, but now my MSE service hangs on startup for four minutes exactly, which means that when I log in, I get the red icon with the "X" inside, and real-time protection is turned off. MSE will then sit there like that for four minutes, at which time it decides to turn protection on and get on with business. The event log says:

What is most annoying about this is that all services that would usually start after MSE are on hold until MSE finishes its business. This means that the machine is sitting idle and near-unusable (no network, no programs that depend on any services) for a full four minutes. After that time, however, the system runs perfectly fine and entirely normal.

What is interesting is that when I uninstall and then re-install MSE, I can boot fine once, or even a few times, until the problem comes back. When it does, another reinstall usually doesn't help anymore. I can then restore the machine from a disk image, at which point I could repeat the exact same song and dance. In addition, I found that if I restore the machine to a disk image that is a week old (at which point the issue did not exist), while the initial boot is fine, after a couple of reboots the problem also starts with this previous state of the system.

A few questions:

- Has anybody ever seen anything like this?
- Any ideas of how I could solve this, short of simply getting rid of MSE (note that, with MSE uninstalled, the system boots perfectly normal). And, please, no "Have you scanned for malware/viruses, etc.?" This machine is clean, period.

 

Run as Administrator sfc /scannow

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Download and run Kaspersy Virus Removal Tool.
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Download and run Rouge Killer
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Dump MSE and use the Free Avast AV. or try/buy Hitman Pro
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1. See the reply by " drcharlesdd replied on December 12, 2012 " here how to fix windows system event log error - Microsoft Community
Same problem signature as yours, but apparently no remedy
There is a reference to System and application logs which need to be looked at later in the aforementioned thread. Hope this helps and Merry Christmas ... I enjoy and often agree with your Win 8 insights!

2. Have you tried turning off the windows update service (I don't believe you can disable MSE's update independently) for testing purposes?

 

Thanks very much, Josea, good find. I posted a response to that thread.

Merry Christmas to you, too!

 

Hi Pirx, a recent update for MSE seems to have caused quite different 'performance' issues.
MS has issued a definitions update for MSE which is supposed 'to resolve performance issues'. link.
Not sure why a problematic definitions update could cause your issues though, was MSE allowed to update itself after restoring an image?

 

Hmm, very interesting! That may have resolved my issue. It's possible that what happened here was that MSE would timeout while trying to figure out what to do with some file it was looking at during startup. I remembered that I had seen issues somewhat like that before, where a file copy would seemingly hang for minutes. Since I didn't want to wait an indefinite amount of time for MS to figure this one out, I have replaced MSE with Avast, which seems to be working just fine. So, for now I am going to stick with that, but thanks a lot for the pointer. Repped.