Is anyone else getting Windows XP (or other?) systems hanging or crashing on login as of this morning (April 16, 2014)?
Here's the situation: All workstations were fine yesterday. Nearly every system in our office (all of them are XP) is hanging on or immediately after the login screen. After a very very long time, a couple of them have made it through to the desktop. Those ones have had variations of MS Security Essentials coming up with the "program has stopped responding" dialog for MSMPEng.exe and other associated .dll's.
In each case, the fix has been to go into safe mode and disable the Service for Microsoft Antimalware.
We have many customers calling in with the same problem, but until we know more, we don't want to recommend disabling their security suite.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Could it be a virus/malware/XP hack?
I've found one other posting on the 'Net so far related to this: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2108032/windows-system-hangs-login-screen-security-essential....