Technology in terms you understand. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! Guide to Staying Safe on the Internet — FREE Edition as my thank you for subscribing!

I found what appears to be a crash report for MsMpEngine, what should I do?

Question:

A friend used my computer for five minutes because they needed to print
something off. They left and then I got on the computer for an hour and shut
down. The next day, I booted up and then decided I would check for error
reports. Upon looking, I saw that anti-malware service executable stopped
working. It also showed “App Crash: MSNP Engine.” Any how, everything seems to be
working fine but that is the first time that this has ever happened and I
wonder why.

In this excerpt from
Answercast #61
, I look at a computer showing an isolated crash report and
what it might mean.

Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free!

Crash reports

You know, it’s interesting. We all want to know why. I can’t tell you why.
Sometimes, these things just happen.

Now, the real question that I want you to focus on is: is Microsoft Security
Essentials still running?

My guess is (my hope is) that it is and that this was an isolated crash that
just happened. I’m sure it happened for a specific reason, but the amount of
effort going into trying to figure out what that specific reason is for a
single crash like that just isn’t worth it in my opinion.

So what I would have done is right-click on the MSE
icon
in your taskbar, open it, and run a scan. Make sure that you can
run a scan; make sure that your scheduled scans are running when you expect
them to be run.

In which case, I would say, “You know, there’s nothing to see here.” There
probably isn’t any kind of a lasting problem. Stuff happens.

Event Viewer

Now, I will say that I don’t know where you looked to get this error
information. If it was the Event Viewer, I want to caution you to (as a layman)
never take the Event Viewer too seriously. It is, to put it bluntly, a
mess!

There’s a lot of stuff in there that (if you don’t know what you’re looking
at) looks really alarming. In fact, a number of online and offline scams center
around the fact that somebody can point an unknowledgeable person at the Event
Viewer and make them believe that things are horribly, horribly broken.

Guess what? On a perfectly running machine, the Event Viewer has a lot of
garbage in it. That’s just the nature of the beast. In reality, the Event
Viewer is really only something that you want to have a technician, or somebody
who really understands Windows Internals, to look at.

So, if that’s where you’re looking, I would also say, “Don’t look there.
Stop looking there!” It will probably frighten you more than it will help you.
As long as Microsoft Security Essentials is running and running properly, I
think you’re fine.

Do this

Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.

I'll see you there!

Leave a reply:

Before commenting please:

  • Read the article.
  • Comment on the article.
  • No personal information.
  • No spam.

Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam. All comments containing links and certain keywords will be moderated before publication.

I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read.