Build 165: Antivirus woes

Support
1

After update to Build 165, Bitdefender antivirus (free version) is quarantining processreaper.exe on a PC (32 bit Win 10) that I’m using for Roon control. I’m running Roon Core (Server) on a separate PC (64 bit Win 10) and surprisingly, Bitdefender is NOT quarantining anything on that machine.

Here’s the bitdefender info…

Scan Results
The Virus Shield detected one infected item.

File Name Infection Action
C:\Users\mdc\AppData\Local\Roon\Application\100200165\processreaper.exe Gen:Variant.Buhtrap.2 Moved to Quarantine

NOTE: I’m not seeing any issues with Roon. What does processreaper.exe do?

2

When Roon starts up another process (like raatserver or others), due to the way windows process management works, they can be left lingering around if Roon either exits or dies… processreaper cleans up those lingering processes. It sits idle, taking up very few real resources (the entire codebase is about 30 lines of code!), until “bad” occurs, and then it fixes things up. If nothing bad happens, it does nothing but sit idle.

You will want to add an exception for it.

3

Avast also wanted to quarantine something as Roon was updated. I got the option to allow, which obviously I chose and all is well in Roonland.

SJB

4

Windows Defender is so good at this stuff… it used to be pretty basic stuff, but its gotten really accurate, and it’s so integrated into the core of Windows, it barely makes a performance impact on your machine. You’d be surprised at how much of a performance hit you are taking using third party antivirus.

5

Danny, thanks for the quick response and insight on processreaper. Exception added.

Interesting insight on Windows Defender since most antivirus write-ups still tend to rate it lower. But your point in performance impact is a good one. Thanks!

6

yah, well, there is real world impact and there is check the boxes type feature list.

Defender usually loses on “completeness” or “accuracy”, but that is due to quantity (numbers like 95% vs 97%), and not quality of the catch. The few % it loses on are never really the important/prevalent malware out there.

The benefits of Defender are huge… free, best performance by far, very little to no nagging.

I personally find AV company practices very sleazy… if they don’t remind you they are working, you might not renew. If you use a free AV that works similarly, that’s just laziness in product design. Defender’s goals are also more aligned with the user (protection so you don’t blame Windows for sucking, and performance so you don’t complain your computer is slow).
Third party AV software has a very different goal: upgrade/renew/keep paying.

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