BR issue with Windows Defender or other Anti-virus products?

[Susan Smith]

Hi all,

Have any of you had issues with BR not wanting to load due to drive statement issues? I had a similar problem in 2016 (it's the previous thread in this forum section). This might be related to that (or even the same problem that is continuing). We tried most of the suggestions then, but never really solved the issue. And odd thing is that we can get the problem to stop by turning off Windows Defender! When Windows Defender is on, we get a 4152 error processing the drive statement. Then another msgbox appears, saying "Problem converting the BR path L:\BR\WBSERVER.DAT to an OS path. This could be a drive statement problem". The drive statement is L:,L;,L;,\BR

Note that this happens almost every time on ONE workstation and very sporadically on others. So MOST of the time, BR loads just fine with this drive statement. And when the error occurs, I CAN access the BR folders on the network via My Computer or File Explorer. It's just that BR is choking.

As per the suggestions last year, I tried using the UNC name in the drive statement, but it didn't make any difference. And the odd thing is that it USUALLY works. It works reliably on almost all of the 15 workstations. But one workstation will fail almost every time unless we turn off Windows Defender. We were using Cylance Anti-virus, but it seemed to have even MORE problems with BR so we took it off temporarily. On this one problematic workstation, the user just keeps a window open at all times so she can turn off Windows Defender when she goes into BR, and turn it back on when she needs to access the web. Silly, but it works. Of course, if she needs to access the internet WHILE she is in BR, she walks to another workstation because we have asked her not to access the internet when there is no anti-virus running on her workstation. Some of the other workstations exhibit the same thing, but only every once in a while.

Mai_060617_Loan Sys.jpg (29.84 KiB) Viewed 55673 times

We are running BR 4.2o on a Windows Server 2008 network. All workstations are running up to date Win7.

I don't know where to go next with this. The poor network/hardware guy is pulling his hair out. We may considering going to Client Server, but the boss is unhappy with that solution (for the time being) and wants me to find out what's going on.

-- Susan

[GomezL]

You mentioned that this is tied to Windows Defender.

It sounds like a false positive by the security application.

Try adding the wbserver.dat to the "Exclude List" in Windows Defender.

I also highly recommend going to client server.

Since your example showed the "L:" drive, I am going to suggest that on the file server you mount a hard disk called "L:", and then let the workstation & server both have "L: Drives". Switching to client server in that configuration is really easy.

George (And others) have a much more sophisticated implementation where the "L: Drive" isn't even mapped on the workstation, but that takes a lot more effort.

[Susan Smith]

Thank you Luis! I will followup. One question: Normally, files that you exclude from anti-virus software are permanent files. But wbserver.dat gets deleted and recreated often. Would such an exclusion generally survive across these deletions and re-creations?

-- Susan

[mluchterhand]

Susan,

If for some reason excluding the individual file doesn't take care of your issue you can usually exclude an entire folder. So you should be able to just exclude the entire "L:\br\" directory and I'd imagine it would take care of the issue as well.

Matt

[John]

Is L: a mapped network drive?
Modern Windows security does not like you running executables from a mapped network drive and might be trying to impose stricter security on you. You might try running the BR*.exe from local machines and just share the data but not the executable.

[Susan Smith]

John,

Yes, the L: drive is a mapped network drive. I never heard that this is problematic. So do you mean that I leave everything up on the server, but copy ONLY the BR.EXE to the local drives? That's interesting. I can try that. Is there anything else that must be located on the local drive? WBCONFIG.SYS files or anything else?

-- Susan

P.S. Thanks to you too, Matt. I will look into the exclusion of the BR folder as well.

[John]

well - yes - you'll need a brconfig.sys located on that machine and the br*.dll probably. Your brconfig.sys could just contain an include \\whatever\whatever\old_wbconfig.sys.


although - if you're setting this up, you might as well go ahead and go client-server. I'm not sure how you're not suffering huge speed issues without it. Maybe windows 7 was before the incompatibility with windows that made client server necessary for multi-user environments.

[bluesfannoz]

Sounds to me as if you need to turn off SMB2 or SMB3 on the fileserver.

That was what we have done to resolve a similar drive statement issue.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... ows-server

[Susan Smith]

Hi Steve,

I remember that you suggested this to me last year as well. I thought I forwarded it to the network guy, and that he said he did it. But just in case that didn't really happen, I'm sending your reply to him now. Thank you!

-- Susan

[bluesfannoz]

We have found it turned back on many times by Microsoft updates. Cannot point you to a specific update unfortunately.

[Susan Smith]

Oh! That's really good to know. We had Windows updates change some permissions at one point too for the "EVERYONE" group. David suggested that we create our own "EVERYONE" group with a different name, and use that group instead of the build-in Microsoft group. I do the same thing in Facebook for custom groups because FB plays with those default groups too! (Or it sends "suggestions" to people in those default groups on occasion. So I just don't use them at all. Some of these big companies really do take a lot upon themselves. Maybe the have the best of motives. And maybe not.

-- Susan

[GomezL]

I expect that the exclude list can be entered, but am not sure (I don't use Defender as my primary protection).

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/pro ... 37570e8eee

If you can't you can always exclude the folder.

My guess is that you can add it if it exists and that it will persist even if it gets deleted/recreated.