Windows mail occasionally hangs Vista when printing an email

[sootsnoot]

Windows Vista Home Premium on HP dv2500t notebook Core 2 duo T7500 @2.2 GHz
with 2 GB RAM. OEM installation December 2007, always current with Windows
Update, installed SP1 a couple of weeks ago with no problem. ESET Smart
Security 3.0.621.0 installed February 2008 (always current with their updates
as well).

I've had relatively few problems with Vista in general, and the ESET
security has worked fine with Windows Mail from the day I installed it.

The problem is that every once in a while (less than once a month),
attempting to print a mail message causes a hard hang of the whole system.
The mouse moves, and for a while I can hover it over items on the task bar or
in the notification area and see a response, or press the Windows key or
click the Start button and get the popup. But if I try to launch any
program, or intereact with one, or ctrl-alt-delete to try to start the task
manager, eventually everything freezes solid and there is nothing I can do to
get a response other than a power reset. There does not appear to be any
disk activity.

Once I reboot the system, everything is fine, and I can restart Windows Mail
and I can print the same message that triggered the hang in the same way to
the same printer with no problem. I have not been able to find any sort of
log file or seen anything in the event log for this, although I am not
knowledgeable about how to do that. Because the problem is not
reproducible, and the interval between occurences is so long, it's not really
practical to try changing different things to see if the problem goes away.
Because SP1 was said to fix a bunch of Vista hangs and a bunch of Windows
Mail problems, I was very hopeful it would fix this. But unfortunately, it
has happened again, after SP1 was installed.

How can I go about tracking this problem down?

Thanks,

-Rich

 

[Hal Hostetler [MVP-P/I]]

If ESET is scanning your email, you need to uninstall this feature; email
scanning is not compatible with Vista SP1. Email scanning is not necessary
anyway, it is entirely redundant, does nothing but create problems, and adds
no extra security whatsoever. ESET's resident file system scanner will
handle anything you get through email, provided you keep it up to date.

http://support.microsoft.com/KB/951805
Stop error message when you send or receive e-mail messages on a Windows
Vista-based computer that has e-mail scanning software installed:
"STOP:0x1000008E KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED_M"

Hal
--
Hal Hostetler, CPBE -- (e-mail address removed)
Senior Engineer/MIS -- MS MVP-Print/Imaging -- WA7BGX
http://www.kvoa.com -- "When News breaks, we fix it!"
KVOA Television, Tucson, AZ. NBC Channel 4
Still Cadillacin' - www.badnewsbluesband.com

 

[sootsnoot]

I don't really want to argue with an expert, but I don't see how this
solution matches the problem I am seeing. I have marked this as not an answer
because:

1. The cited KB article:
a. Describes a STOP error.
- I am not getting a STOP error, rather a hang.
b. Describes a problem introduced by SP1.
- My problem happened before I installed SP1, and continued
with the same symptoms after I installed SP1.

2. You state that email scanning is completely redundant and should be
turned off.
a. My problem occurs only when attempting to print a message. I do not
believe
that printing a message already in the Inbox involves any scanning.
b. According to the cited KB article, disabling email scanning is a
workaround
for the SP1 bug, and it may increase security risk.
c. I have also seen emails with infected attachments caught by ESET
filtering,
so that also makes it a liittle hard to accept an unconditional
statement that
it does nothing to improve security.

Thanks,

-Rich

 

[Gary VanderMolen]

That KB article may not fit your exact circumstances, but a reasonable
person could deduce that antivirus email scanning can result in problems
with Windows Mail.

There is a more general article about this issue here:
http://thundercloud.net/infoave/tutorials/email-scanning/index.htm

One possible solution for you is an upgrade to Windows Live Mail:

http://get.live.com/wlmail/overview

 

[Hal Hostetler [MVP-P/I]]

1. The article is for a problem you've not yet experienced, but may, should
you keep the email scanning active. Email scanning is not compatible with
Vista SP1 as the article demonstrates.

2. The way email scanners operate, the hang in printing could well be an
artifact of the email scanner.

3. Please examine the following:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPOR...88256c7500723cf0?OpenDocument&src=bar_sch_nam
Frequently asked questions about Norton AntiVirus Email Scanning

Q - Is my computer still protected against viruses if I disable Email
Scanning?
A- Disabling Email Scanning does not leave you unprotected against viruses
that are distributed as email attachments. Norton AntiVirus Auto-Protect
scans incoming files as they are saved to your hard drive, including email
and email attachments. Email Scanning is just another layer on top of this.
To make sure that Auto-Protect is providing the maximum protection, keep
Auto-Protect enabled and run LiveUpdate regularly to ensure that you have
the most recent virus definitions.

http://thundercloud.net/infoave/tutorials/email-scanning/index.htm
Why You Don't Need Your Anti-Virus Program to Scan Your E-Mail
4. I don't immediately suspect something in the printer subsystem, as such
things usually affect more than one application.

5. What do you have to lose by removing email scanning except maybe the
problem you're having and a little time?

Hal

Hal Hostetler, CPBE -- (e-mail address removed)
Senior Engineer/MIS -- MS MVP-Print/Imaging -- WA7BGX
http://www.kvoa.com -- "When News breaks, we fix it!"
KVOA Television, Tucson, AZ. NBC Channel 4
Still Cadillacin' - www.badnewsbluesband.com

 

[sootsnoot]

I see your points, there does seem to be more general agreement
that Windows Mail has trouble with email scanners, and that email
scanners don't buy you much protection, than had been evident
in the first answer. So I'll consider this one answered.

But instead of disabling the scanner and deleting/re-creating the
email accounts in Windows Mail, I've decided to try Windows Live
Mail. First impression installing it is that it's a little annoying about
trying to get you signed up for stuff and install more things than
you need, but if you just say no to extras, it installs fairly quickly
and automatically imports messages, contacts, and accounts
from Windows Mail. Of course if you didn't want it to do that,
it would be a pain, since it doesn't give you an option not to, but
for me that was okay. In terms of importing contacts, it mostly
did okay, but missed a couple for no obvious reason, and while it
created groups from Windows Mail groups, it created them empty
and I had to go in by hand to add contacts to the groups. For
message import, it did seem to get all the messages, but with
a seemingly arbitrary decision process for putting them in the
Inbox below the email account, or the Inbox below the "Stored
Messages" folder. Under Windows Mail there was only one email
account (a POP3) and one Inbox, with settings to delete messages
from the server as they were downloaded. Why Windows Live Mail
decided to create two Inboxes, and put a couple of thousand messages
in one, and a couple of thousand in the other, with interspersed dates,
I have no idea.

I did not disable the email scanning, so it remains to be seen whether
printing a message will hang the system sometime over the next
few months. If it does, then I'll try turning off the scanning.

Thanks,

-Rich

 

[Gary VanderMolen]

Let us know how the printing with Windows Live Mail goes.