I knew better than this. I think… My Flight Sim computer has never had any anti-virus or anti-malware software beyond what came with Windows 7. I don’t use that computer for much beyond flight simming anyway. But, this past weekend my Win10 laptop went into drydock and I was researching how to “root” an old Galaxy 5 phone that don’t use anymore. I thought I might turn it into a dedicated car GPS. All the YouTube videos on this started by saying I had to “root” it first. So it was while researching on how to “root” my phone that I got hit with one of those “Your computer has been locked. Call Microsoft support at 1-900-123-4567...” scams. Luckily it didn’t take over my computer, and a BleachBit pass cleaned it. After that I decided to install Kaspersky anti-virus on that machine. I already had it on my Win10 laptop and I bought two licenses, so I was all good there. As soon as I installed it I ran a full scan. Bad idea…
Kaspersky flagged MANY of my payware airplane installers. The message I got for each of them was: “Not a virus, but… this file has been identified as having remote administration capabilities and could be used to screw you”. Something like that. The odd thing is, in some cases Kaspersky allowed me to add this .exe file to an exclusion list, but in other cases it just flat out deleted them! So it just deleted several payware installers! I expect the “remote administration” software it found in those files is related to piracy detection, and that’s an entirely different, and interesting, discussion for another time… But it gets worse.
FSX will no longer start. I get the welcome screen, but that’s it. I shut down Kaspersky and restarted the computer, with no change. Kaspersky must have deleted something important… All the files it said it deleted, in the logs it produces, were in my archive of saved aircraft installers and downloads, not in the FSX installed location. And you can’t get the deleted files back anyway. They’re gone forever.
So my guess is that Kaspersky deleted some “suspicious” files and dlls from various aircraft in my SimObjects folder and didn’t tell me about it. You know, those dlls with “remote administration” code in them… Hmm. Anyway, my next step will be to start deleting planes from my SimObjects folder, one by one, to see if that allows FSX to start again.
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