Saturday, May 26, 2018

Windows Defender Security Center Health Report detail missing

Right now I am running Windows 10 Home x64 OS build version 1803 (aka April Update).

There are a few nutty things that I have observed over the past few week. Though the update itself went on smoothly with no issues.

Recently I noticed that the Windows Defender Security icon in the system tray has started to display an error indicator.

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Normally that means I need to run a “Quick Scan”, however in this build, that also brings up the Windows Defender Security Center that has a Health report.

The error was caused by a Device driver with one recommendation showing to clear.

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Selecting the down-arrow to expand however resulted in nothing seen.

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Reboots did not clear the issue.

The non-display of items in the Health report page appears to be a fairly common issue with a number of suggested fixes.

There were a number of different ways I could approach tackling this issue, but here is the way I cleared the problem that most people may find more informative.

I pressed the “Windows” key and then the “R” key to bring up the Run box.

I then typed “perfmon /report” and clicked “OK”.  (more here).

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After a minute or two the same Health report was generated but in greater detail via the Resource and Performance Monitor.

Looking in the Warnings/Error section, it was immediately obvious to me that the driver issue was related to the “Virtual CloneDrive” application I have installed.

(Note: I ignored the Photosmart printer error because my printer was offline.)

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I have used Virtual CloneDrive from Elaborate Bytes for a very long time with great results. It allows me to mount a wide range of “image” files such a ISO, BIN, and IMG types (among others) as a virtual drive letter for quick content access. It is free and says it is Win 10 compatible.  However it hasn’t been updated for some time.

I next checked my Device Manager properties and confirmed that the device driver was in error.

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Rather than go about trying to fix this particular issue, I just uninstalled Virtual CloneDrive from my system. This cleared the error in the Device Manager view.

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Checking the Windows Defender Security Center Health report found the error now cleared.

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…and the Windows Defender system icon restored to a normal health state.

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Takeaway: if you want really detailed breakdown of issues found in the Health Report, run a “perfmon /report” session to collect your system state details then get troubleshooting!

Additional notes:

Because I was already using the incredible (and in many ways more fully-featured) Pismo File Mount Audit Package application from Pismo Technic Inc. to mount most of my ISO image files anyway, I just updated that one to the latest version available and didn’t bother to reinstall Virtual CloneDrive.

I also have these applications as well on my system so I’m not missing anything when I need to mount a  particular image file:

Cheers!

--Claus V.