Security Center question

[Menno Hershberger]

This is probably off topic for this group, but there are some good minds in
here...
I have a computer here with XP-SP2 all up to date. It has never been
plagued with viruses or spyware. It is coming up clean in MSAS plus Spybot
S&D, and AdAware. But the security center keeps saying that there is no
firewall turned on and there's no antivirus software. However, the computer
is running the latest version of Zone Alarm and also the latest version of
Grisoft AVG. Both of those are *supposed* to be recognized. Anyone have any
idea what might be going on here?

 

[Dave M]

Hi Menno;
I think you need to tell us if your running AVG Anti-Virus plus Firewall
Edition. What's supposed to happen is that you tell the XP security center that
another firewall is going to handle the work, in which case internal security
should only monitor that the firewall is active and alert you if it's not.

A couple of things could be going on here... if you are running two firewalls
they could be conflicting, or the internal security monitor is coming up before
your third party firewall and you're being notified during the interim. I see
that all the time with Windows OneCare until it's fully loaded, but then the
notice goes away... and by loaded I mean until the GUI is loaded, not just the
startup OneCare Live service.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

There are some registry entries that control whether or not the Security
center monitors antivirus def dates and firewall up/down. These got some
publicity because Spybot Search & Destroy in recent versions looks at them
and flags it if the Security Center is set to not monitor. "Not monitor" is
the preferred choice of both Symantec and McAfee who prefer to control the
alerts to the customer themselves.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this--it doesn't sound like these are set
wrong--it sounds more like there's a registry area for communication between
the apps and the security center which maybe has permissions set such that
the security center can't see what's going on.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/mangxpsp2/mngsecps.mspx

search down to the second reference to firewall (major heading "Security
Center"

I think this shows where to find the policy settings--but I'm not sure the
detail is there. If it isn't, there's a link at the end to a second article
which probably does have that detail.

 

[Menno Hershberger]

Thanks to both of you. There were some other issues with that computer
that were causing problems and I finally decided to wipe it clean and
start over. As always, I cloned his hard drive and got his data back from
that after I reinstalled everything. He decided to spring for Norton
Internet Security this time, so I didn't run into any security center
problems.
But I've worked with lots of other computers that were running the free
AVG and/or Zone Alarm and I know the Security Center is supposed to
recognize them.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Yes--it should. Unless maybe it was the older 6.x version?? Were the icons
the same? I can't remember..
(that's AVG I'm talking about--I don't know about ZA and the security
center--I'm sure there's a version dependency, but I've no idea what it
was.)
--