Outpost & 64bit vista/server 2008 sp2 woes

[flukey]

hello outpost firewall forum.

it has been a minute since i have used vista OR server 2008 for that matter. prior reasons involved issues with the operating system and outpost instability. with the announcement of no more half-open tcpip ( NO MORE HALF-OPEN!!! ) restrictions in the release of SP2 for vista & server 2008 i decided to give both a try.

after a clean install of both Vista SP2 & Server 2008 SP2 (separately) with Outpost Firewall 2009 (v6.5.4.2525.381.0687) being the first application installed… Outpost Firewall crashes explorer.exe (event id 1000 /shell32.dll) upon right click on any folder in the navigation pane & sometimes upon right click of normal files. The navigation pane issue is crashes explorer everytime. with vista it further complicates other area's of the GUI than with server 2008, thus making vista more unstable & unpredictable.

i had this issue with vista sp1, but it wasn't this bad. also i never linked it to being related to outpost at the time (since i was being lazy), but now i know it was outpost causing the problems the entire time.

after using "Autoruns" provided by sysinternals, i realized that it was outpost causing this issue 100%. then i came to the conclusion that the problem had to be one of the many shell extensions/modules that Outpost installs. so... after some testing, and several reinstallations... i discovered the solution to this issue is to install outpost WITHOUT Web Control & Anti-Spyware Modules. Thus resulting in no more explorer.exe event id 1000 issues. weird, but OK! now i can use outpost... sort of.

sounds fair enough? right? not so much... not for me anyways. it gets a bit more complicated, and the next part i do not have the slightest clue about.

to any AMD phenom users:
if anyone remembers the first series of phenom (9600 & below), they were manufactured with flaw in the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) that would cause crippling bandwidth issues on any OS. granted there was a patch, it was still annoying. i used to own one, so i know very well how annoying it could get. well... now my system consists of an AMD phenom II 920 processor, which does not have the TLB issue and the speed is great.

prior to installation of outpost (as the first application installed on a clean system) processor speed & functionality is normal, BUT after the installation of outpost firewall, i discover that outpost &/or some component resultant thereof is causing my phenom II quad core performance to be throttled as if it has the TLB issue . as a result, my processor bandwidth is reduced to about 300kbs versus the 1600-1800kbs norm. Upon uninstall, processor functionality is returned to normal. I haven't found any workaround to this issue yet.

here are before and after shots using winrar to benchmark
before outpost
after outpost
what the..

[flukey]

update:

i went ahead and did some further testing with outpost firewall & ALSO security suite
mainly i was trying to find a version that didn't cause the issue with my processor
i have come to the conclusion that every version of outpost firewall/security suite that came after v6.5.2509x (v6.5.2514 -> *& above) has the same problems that i described in the post above.

v6.5.2509x is the working version i stopped testing on, because it appears to be OK, especially with the processor
(digital signature dec. 25th 2008)

[eezdva]

Ok great to hear someone else has a problem.

Actually I installed OP on a clean machine and no problems. Once I for example deinstall it and then install it again the system starts uü. But once restarted and want to configur anything in OP ( or if I fake to change anything to hit apply) OP freezes and explorer.exe too.

Will try to install it without spyware and webcontrol. Maybe it will work.