Reply #18: Weird ...

[RoyGBiv]

Well, the only Comodo product I've ever used is the firewall, so I can't comment on how it deals with anti-virus, malware, etc. The firewall works well.

I still am inclined to think there's another issue at play than simply an incompatibility problem, but I couldn't guess what it is without a lot of detailed information. I'll just say that I've experienced problems similar to what you experienced, and in all those cases the issue turned out to be some screwed up thing the DRM was doing.

I loathe Electronic Arts, partly because I love their games. I'm addicted to the Sims and just got the Sims 3 this past weekend, so I'm dealing with my Windows box more than usual. It has a new download manager and a program launcher that are positively the worst pieces of crap I have ever seen in a commercial game as far as intrusiveness into the system and lack of freedom of choice. I had to fart around with my firewall settings for awhile before the damn thing would load in under 5 minutes ... and it *forces* the use of Internet Exploiter, which I had blocked entirely from even running. It will eventually load without IE being able to connect to the Internet, but you sorta have to fake not having a network connection to prevent IE from doing its thing. If you want the custom content available from EA, you *have* to allow the program launcher to use IE; there's no way around it that I've found so far.

As for updates so frequent that you can't even surf the web, well, yeah, that's one way to prevent virus infection ... not a very practical one, but it would work, sorta like unplugging the thing from the wall would work. As I said, I've not used their full suite, so I don't know what it could be doing. It strikes me as odd that it is updating that frequently, however. The firewall program does a check once per day for updates ... which reminds me, it uses Internet Exploiter too. Dammit ... that's why it got the error. I'll have to do manual updates. Blah.