Couple of issues with Antivirus Free Edition - Beta

MrDoh

I mostly really like the new Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition - Beta. Hard to dig any information out of it, but it is quiet, low impact, takes care of business, and I can do on demand scans easily. Just for the record, I'm using Windows 10 Professional Edition, Anniversary Update.

The issues that I'm having are these:

1. It finds 2 or 3 files on my hard drives that it says are password protected. My choices are to provide the password, or skip scanning them. These file are from third party products, one is simply a Linux distribution install image file (Elementary OS) and the other is a .dll file in Samsung Magician app for my SSD. Neither of these is password protected as far as I know, and other virus scanners that I have used on my desktop computer don't have this problem. While I'm not very concerned about these specific files, I'd like everything on my disk to be scanned. Wondering what this means, and if this is a Beta thing or what?

2. When I boot my computer in the morning (I leave it off at night), Windows 10 asks me if I trust Bitdefender and want to allow it to be run? I assume that this is BItdefender updating its virus and malware definitions. Any suggestions on how I can permanently trust it, or why it isn't installed in a way that it is trusted? Is this something that I need to put up with because this is a Beta? Could this be manually changed in the system certificate repository?

Thanks very much for this excellent free product!

 

MrDoh

Okay, the last time that I got the "do you trust this product", I clicked on "Don't show this again" in that pop-up. Now I get a security notification that my virus protection is out of date, and I need to click on it to get Bitdefender to update itself. Bitdefender does update itself after I click on that new security notification, so that apparently enables it to run.

I really do like Bitdefender, but there's no reason for this intrusiveness...it's the first time that I've used an antivirus that I have to somehow give permission to every time I boot my computer. I've removed it and reinstalled it, on the theory that I missed something during the installation, or that something weird happened. That didn't change anything.

Not sure what I'm going to do, just put up with this, or buy the current non-free antivirus. Or go find another less intrusive antivirus.

I guess I'm the only one experiencing this, since there are no replies about it. Or this is not an active forum...not sure what the actual situation is.

Kind of hanging here, wondering what's going on. Beta product, yes, but again, never had a Beta product that had to be explicitly enabled to run.

Update: I see the added scheduled task that has been scheduled by Bitdefender (C:\Program Files\Bitdefender Agent\WatchDog.exe), runs every 30 minutes at user logon. Which explains the new transient window that I see when I boot up my computer in the morning. But I don't see anything unusual about this .exe file, seems to be run by "SYSTEM", which should give it whatever privileges that it needs. And I did run WatchDog.exe as admin manually, and it did its job without asking for any permissions, but that's after its already run successfully. So there's something about this task that isn't right. I added a task to update WIndows Defender virus definitions when I was using that, and had no problems when I did that, that task would just run and do it's job. Don't immediately see what's different about what Bitdefender is doing than what I did. I'm wondering if this is an interaction with the new Windows 10 Anniversary Edition scheduled tasks problems, or what. Guess I'll try Bitdefender support, although I didn't want to bother support for a free product.

Thanks.

MrDoh

Ah, I think that I know what the problem might be. The Windows 10 Anniversary update did break the scheduled tasks thing in some way, the "run whether user is logged on or not" thing isn't quite right. So the scheduled task is not running initially, but once permission is given (driven by the antivirus definitions being out of date) it runs as it should. To look at this more, I should disable the scheduled task for Bitdefender, reboot my system and run WatchDog.exe manually (as admin) and see if it needs any help. My guess is that would work fine, that it's a Windows scheduled task problem.

Now I'm wondering if I bought the non-free version, if it uses a scheduled task...if so, it would have the same problem. Bummer. I keep hoping that Windows will fix its own scheduled task's functionality, apparently has not done that yet.

Never mind, I just need to decide if I'm okay with giving permission, since if the above is the case, I can't use Bitdefender without this extra intrusion.