Network Drive issue

[Guest]

I have a windows 2000 machine running windows defender, and when running a
full system scan, it searches not only the local drives but the networked
ones as well is there any way to stop this? also if there is no floppy
present then it invokes an error which can only be cleared by inserting a
disc, can this also be stopped?

 

[Bill Sanderson]

This is an error which I have also seen in person, and I don't have a
workaround for it, I'm afraid. I don't know whether choosing a custom scan
and explicitly choosing which drives to scan works--haven't tried that yet.

If you see these issues on a quickscan, that suggestion (custom scan)
definitely won't work.

 

[Guest]

I have had the same problem with WinDefdr running on XP pro scanning all my
networked connected drives. When running a custom scan I can limit the scan
to my own PC drive, but the scheduled scans ignore those custom folder
settings, and run against all networked drives. I have had to limit my
scheduled scans to "quck scans" to avoid the problem. This was NOT a problem
with the old Antispyware program. Looks like they simplified this program too
much.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Say more about what kind of network this is on--and what network client
software is involved?

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[Guest]

I am on a large university network, and have 11 drive letters mapped to
shared drives on various servers. No special network client software used
besides Windows XP pro (current to all patch levels).

When scheduling daytime WD scans, I found that after it finished my C drive,
it just kept going to scan my mapped network drive shares. not acceptable,
and not a problem in Antispyware product where I was able to specify what
drives to scan, and what folders to skip (like my mp3 music folders).

 

[Bill Sanderson]

That's clear--thanks.

As a workaround, I would recommend limiting scheduled scans to
quickscans--as the Windows Defender help recommends.

The quickscan is intended to be fully effective at finding in-place
spyware--it starts with the memory content and startup vectors and works
back from there--so it should find anything that is running. The
recommendation is to use the fullscan only when the quickscan finds
something.

I do agree that scanning the network drives should be controllable,
though--there have been several complaints about this behavior, but I
haven't been clear whether it might involve third-party network
redirectors--you've got an easy case to reproduce--thanks!

--

 

[Guest]

you might want to look at the drive mappings and maybe disconnect them
temporarily while the scan is in progress not ideal i know but at least your
scheduled scan will finish quicker.
alternatively go to general settings and add the drive paths to the advanced
options of drives/files not to be checked this is what i have done it works
for me

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

That's a good idea. I really haven't observed this in small office
domain-based networks I work with--perhaps because I don't do full scans
except when I first touch a machine--but even then, I think I would have
noticed if it had scanned the shared network drive, which is huge--so there
must be some variability about who sees this issue and who does not.

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