The two women in my life (my wife and my mother) started to complain to me this weekend that their computers were acting funny. My wife couldn't get her email. My mother couldn't do anything at all; her system became totally nonresponsive as soon as it booted into Windows. Both machines were showing 100% CPU utilization. In both cases, I found that the problem was a bad (very bad) Trend Micro virus pattern update (all my machines use Trend). I found instructions on Trend's site to fix the problem and all is copacetic again.
This is an especially bad problem, though. Because of the way this bug affects computers, there's no easy way to implement the fix. I had to startup both PCs in safe mode, delete the bad file, and then reboot. I fear this update might be causing very serious problems out there in the real world, where people don't have access to geeks willing to run down bugs like this.
Boy, am I mad at Trend.
