We have a few ageing PCs running Windows XP SP3 at work and at random times we sometimes get the following error message popping up at system startup...



Any ideas what's causing it? Software installed that's common to all of the PCs is...
* MS Office 2003
* AVG 2013 Free Edition
* Adobe Flash Player (latest)
* Adobe Reader (latest) and/or Acrobat 7 Professional
* Windows Live Mail for email client

Can anyone suggest what's causing the error and, more importantly, how to stop it? Thanks!

A quick Google suggests it's part of AVG.

Thanks, hmm not surprising really.

Since AVG 2012 it's become a bit of a bloated beast TBH and slows these old PCs down a lot compared to earlier versions. A shame, as it used to be a fast, lightweight bit of software - right, looks like I'm on the lookout for another free anti-virus software then. Any suggestions?

Cheers

Microsoft security essentials is fine for most users.

I tried it a couple of years ago but wasn't particularly impressed at the time - it too slowed down the PCs so much I had to uninstall it. Maybe it's improved, will have another look once I've removed AVG.

I use MSE on my pretty wimpy Netbook and it doesn't slow it down noticeably. It did go through a bad patch though. It started really lite, then it was awful for a while, now it's OK. Still not as lite as it started off, but nothing ever is.

With XP I also use "preventative measures" which do not harm performance at all. In fact, they can improve it. Have a look at Spybot - Search & Destroy. Use the "vaccinate" option which blocks known sources of infection, but do not even consider turning on the "tea timer" option because it's a nightmare for un-savy users who tend to break everything. It also has useful tools for tidying up your startups and other bits.

I have Windows Defender (MSE for Windows 8) on my Atom based tablet and I don't notice it running.

I used to have to run a fleet of Athlon 2000+ PCs with 256MB RAM (2009/2010) and they had had Symantec's corporate suite installed on them a couple of years earlier by the previous admin, but he had never run a scan and real-time scanning was disabled, because it made the hardware unusably slow! I ran a scan on one machine, the machine couldn't be used for anything else for 48 hours!

I switched to GData and I forced every PC to perform a scan, it found a few thousand infected files, even though they swore that the network was clean! One virus was particularly bad and I would have had to close one of the sites down for a whole weekend and remove every machine from the network and only re-attach and patch them, once the virus had been removed. Between cleaning and patching, if there was another infected machine on the network, the clean PC would be reinfected!

I never got permission to clean the site...