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Skyrim Versus ThreatFire

[Nov 13, 2011, 5:06 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

Long-time friend o' Blue's ^Drag0n^ sends along his discovery of a solution for a problem causing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to crash with a "Skyrim has stopped working" message. In his case he traced this back to the use of ThreatFire Antivirus. Here's word:

It looks like the PC version of Skyrim is not something that PCTools Threatfire likes. Threatfire causes the game to crash at the launcher when you hit "play" with no message, other than "Skyrim has stopped working."

How did I figure this out? I had a similar problem with CoD: World at War a while back which made me think Threatfire might be the issue.

The easiest way to fix the issue is to just uninstall Threatfire completely.

You can force-quit Threatfire from the process monitor, but you also have to force-quit ALL other ThreatFire/PC Tools modules to make that work (please note that you will have to reboot or open Threatfire from the Start menu to get it running again after doing this):

(1) CTRL + [RIGHT CLICK] Threatfire in the system tray, and select "exit."
(2) In an administrator-level command window, type "net stop threatfire" (without the quotes)

Note: "Suspending" ThreatFire alone from the systray will NOT fix the problem.

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52.

Re: Skyrim Versus ThreatFire

Nov 17, 2011, 17:57

^Drag0n^

Parallax Abstraction wrote on Nov 13, 2011, 18:17:
Good catch. I've worked with almost every anti-virus there is in my career and I've never heard of ThreatFire. Is this popular?

Sorry I missed this one.

I wouldn't say it's popular, but it does come bundled in PC Tools AV, or is free if downloaded independently.

The rub on it is that it's a Day Zero heuristic monitor that looks for 'suspicious application behavior' and stops it when it occurs. The downside is that it looks like a handful of games (CoD:WaW, Skyrim, and some PunkBuster-enabled titles) take exception to what it's doing and do not launch. They just stop.

PC Tools is aware of these issues, but it involves a level of cooperation with the authors of the code triggering a false positive, most of which don't seem too inclined to jump on addressing the issue.

Not surprising, because as you pointed out, there just aren't a lot of people that use ThreatFire. I'm just disappointed that the studios don't at least test for this or make people aware when an issue becomes known.




"Never start a fight, but always finish it."

Subject

Comment [quote="^Drag0n^"Nov 17, 2011, 17:57][quote="Parallax Abstraction"Nov 13, 2011, 18:17]Good catch. I've worked with almost every anti-virus there is in my career and I've never heard of ThreatFire. Is this popular? [/quote] Sorry I missed this one. I wouldn't say it's popular, but it does come bundled in PC Tools AV, or is free if downloaded independently. The rub on it is that it's a Day Zero heuristic monitor that looks for 'suspicious application behavior' and stops it when it occurs. The downside is that it looks like a handful of games (CoD:WaW, Skyrim, and some PunkBuster-enabled titles) take exception to what it's doing and do not launch. They just stop. PC Tools is aware of these issues, but it involves a level of cooperation with the authors of the code triggering a false positive, most of which don't seem too inclined to jump on addressing the issue. Not surprising, because as you pointed out, there just aren't a lot of people that use ThreatFire. I'm just disappointed that the studios don't at least test for this or make people aware when an issue becomes known. [/quote]

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