Trend Micro Titanium Follow Up

They say you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.  Can you check out the other end?

I said I'd follow up in a couple of months following my less-than-stellar experience with the installation of Trend Micro Titanium.  Well, this is sooner than a couple of months.  Alas, it is to report that I have uninstalled it and its little dog Safe Sync, too.

As I reported before, I had gotten a year subscription to try from BzzAgent.  I had some reservations about removing a perfectly good computer security system, Microsoft Security Essentials, in order to simply install Trend Micro Titanium.  Then, the Safe Sync irritated me by overfilling my allotted sync space and popping up every few seconds until I forced Safe Sync to close.  Not good.

I figured I would ignore it, though, as long as it did its job.  Ok, so every time I restart my computer, Safe Sync would restart and tell me that I should buy more space.  Erk.  Ah well, I can turn that off.  So I did.

As long as I kept Safe Sync off, I was ok, right?  Wrong.  I came home the other day after a long drive from an out of town business trip.  I shuffle into my office to do some gaming before unpacking and going to bed.  At least I thought that's what I was going to do.

My computer is in stasis, having tried to restart for some unknown reason.  Grr.  Reboot.  Check issues.  "Your computer has recovered from an unexpected crash."  Yeah, duh.  Why?  "Coreframeworkhost.exe crash dump."  What's that?  Google.  It's a Trend Micro program that makes Trend Micro programs work together.  Not cool.  Still, programs sometimes crash, right?  And it seems to be stable now that I've rebooted.

*grumble* No relaxing gaming before bed, though.

Tonight, my lovely boyfriend tries to download the latest update on our favorite online game, since I worked late and I might want to play the new expansion when I get home.  Aww.  Except that it won't update.  He suspects Trend Micro.  In the back of my mind, I do, too.

Still, I restart my computer.  Things seem to be working ok...  My taskbar's loading funky.  Grr.  Fine, I'll check Titanium.  Sure enough, it's dead.  It claims to have "caught 1 threat in the last month," but I can't expand it to find out what it is.  It's grey and dead, claiming that I need to restart my computer.  Uh.  I just did that.  Ok, fine.  I'll do it again, since I need to see if my taskbar can be fixed.

Nope.  Still weird.  And Trend Micro Titanium is still dead.

That's it.  Uninstall!

I uninstalled both the antivirus software and the Safe Sync.  I reinstalled Microsoft Security Essentials.  Viola!  All is right in the world.

Except that I have to re-download the game update that got interrupted by this whole mess.  I guess I get to go to bed sans relaxing gaming.  Computer security FAIL.