A lesson in not panicking too early...

[Rami]

To all,

I thought this might help some folks. All of a sudden today, all seven of my installs on my XP machine AND all seven installs on my laptop suddenly stopped working, and all at the same time. I was truly perplexed. I tried deleting the filelist.dat files and .cdp files, no dice. Then, checked the 100-plane limits. Nothing there either.

At a loss, I started wondering if perhaps an anti-virus update (I use Bit Defender Internet Security 2012) had eaten something it shouldn't have. Checking my logs, I found that the update had identified my "weather.dll" module as a malicious process, and had deleted it automatically from all seven of my installs on both my machines. After having figured this out, I was able to make an exception in my anti-virus settings, replaced the files, and got everything working again.

The lesson...don't be anxious to "pull the plug" on your installs if something goes awry...an investigative streak and a little logic goes a long way! :ernae:

[bearcat241]

Good advice Rami...as a hard rule i NEVER allow my AV program to monitor or scan anything on my E:\Games or G:\Sims drives, which house all of my games and flight sims. The contents of these two drives are pemanently excluded from AV real-time protection or periodic system scanning. As i see it, these drives only contain data that has been installed from clean CD's and scanned downloads, so there's nothing on them that would pose a threat. This also allows my sims and games to load and run faster, since their files don't have to pass AV approval to load into physical memory.

[Hern07]

Oh come on, Rami. It's never too early to panich (lol)

[JEDDRAGON]

That's what my computer repair teacher tells me on fixing computers even at this point. I should of taken that more seriously since I'm one those guys
who takes drastic measures to fix things and finds out the hard way that it's easier then that +______+