Obscure bug (Microsoft Security Essentials)

I found a bug that probably won't affect many people but it took me forever to figure out what was wrong. I'm not even certain that it is the entire root cause but it did mitigate it.

After reinstalling Windows7 Ultimate 64 bit because the RC was expiring, I found that under certain circumstances I was lagging a lot.

Normally I see 30-50 fps but whenever I lagged I would see .2-3 fps. The entire system was stalling, like mini freezes.

Normally most people won't even see the problem, but if you have lots of knockback it may happen if you have a slowish storage subsystem and you are running Microsoft Security Essentials. Note that I had no lag otherwise until I used knockback powers on 3 mobs and up. After about 10 mobs and up the game would be essentially rendered unplayable (.1 fps or less), and the network connection would stall as well since the system was freezing up entirely.

The solution is to put CityofHeroes.exe on unmonitored status in MSE, uninstall MSE and use something else, or forgo lots of knockback (ie. force bubble herding or footstomp or hurricane).

Alternatively a fast storage subsystem, like a SSD, can be fast enough where the MSE monitoring doesn't seem to cause any interference.

Again, I'm not 100% certain that MSE alone is causing this since I had to reinstall the entire OS from scratch. It could be that I have non-optimal drivers installed for the hard disk to make it lag with MSE.

Strange. I was on my Windows 7 64-bit install that also has MSE installed all weekend and didn't have a bit of trouble.

And before you say it Pum, yes, I was teamed Thursday and Friday. Mostly with DP users so there was knockback galore.

Or knockdown. Can't recall which effect is used if knockback isn't slotted for.

Is it possible to be somehow related to recording of the log file?

For the record,


a friend of mine found this topic while I was just about in tears during double XP weekend, being unable to play for half of it, and thought I was either having massive graphics card issues (after the rollback of the previous driver than Nvidia pulled last week), or hardware dying, or perhaps something else. Had we not found this topic I'd still be tearing my hair out. I use MSE and after adding CoH folder to the exclusions list and adding CoH.exe to the process exclusion list, the problem went away. I haven't gone back to test if it still does it if only one of those is enabled. I also fully intend to submit a bug, and possibly give NCSoft a call on it. It needs to be out there and known. For what it's worth 2 of my friends use MSE and don't have these problems, and one of them has an almost identical hardware setup as me, and both of us are running Win7 64-bit. The other is running Vista 32. It doesn't seem to follow any rhyme or reason. I've used MSE since I installed Win7 (even during RC 7100) and never had this problem, but I can't say when it began happening, as I hadn't missioned much before DXP in maybe 2-3 months, mostly just RPing.

This one is weird, that's for sure. I couldn't fight at all as my FPS would drop to less than 1, especially if a grenade was fired, or a massive explosion happened. Battle in general, and especially instanced missions would trigger it, and everytime it triggered, my netgraph would spike, that's why I spent a day believing it was just DXP crapiness. I began to think something was up when none of my other friends had any problems. Outside moving around and not in battle, everything was fine. The effect was less pronounced Hero-Side than Villain-Side (I dropped to 60 or 30 FPS, sometimes even 15, as opposed to 20, 10-12, or sub 5 villain-side). While my top end was about the same on both (150ish). Though admittedly it's harder to consistantly reach that CoV-side, as it always has been.

That's about all the info I can provide.

Also for the record: adding CoH to MSE's exceptions solved my mini freezes too! Thanks!