Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare causes Explorer.exe to crash under XP SP2 and Vista - anyone else having the same problem?

First off, this product has one of the longest names of any Live product, if not the longest name: Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare but has one of the shortest website addresses: http://fss.live.com

With that said, it is actually a really nice program but recently I have witnessed crash problems with Explorer.exe under Windows XP or Vista. I haven't had a chance to attach windbg.exe to an ailing install. I have however posted "Me too" posts to the team's blog and Connect site for this issue.

I originally had run into this issue with one of my XP SP3 beta VMs and at the time wrote it off as a fluke of the VM because it has had so many things installed and uninstalled from it in the past year. Once you uninstall Family Safety, Explorer.exe no longer crashes. Install Family Safety again, and the crashes return.

I was reminded of this problem when my boss ran into the same issue on his home machine recently. I suspect only the very latest version has the crashing problem, but I no longer have copies of the earlier builds.

To get to the point of this post, please post a comment here if you are experiencing crashing problems under XP or Vista with FSS installed. I'm trying to gather a pool of data to send over to the product team. I'm hoping it is a quick and easy fix.

Update: There are a few other people reporting the same problem here on the FSS team's blog. Please let them know too!

Update 2: Thanks to the comment left here by Luc - the update/fix for this is located here!

Posted by Aaron Tiensivu in Microsoft, Vista, Windows Live!, Windows OS, XP at 22:05 | Comments (18) | Trackback (1)

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Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare causes Explorer.exe to crash under XP SP2 and Vista...
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Weblog: Rod Trent at myITforum.com
Tracked: Dec 17, 07:11

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Haven't seen that yet. I'll watch for it, though.

#1 Rod Trent (Homepage) on 2007-12-17 07:11 (Reply)

I have installed OneCare and have been looking on the Internet for this issue for a while now. I installed it as soon as the latest version was offered and since then, boom. Windows Explorer crashes very very often. I always send the report to MS, but hey ... I noticed that I can easily reproduce by opening 2 Windows Explorer windows and trying to copy and paste from one to the other - reproducable 100% of the time.

#1.1 Luc on 2007-12-30 19:44 (Reply)

The fix posted on MS website seems to do the trick. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946758

#1.1.1 Luc on 2007-12-30 23:35 (Reply)

Hi there. I used to have 2 systems running FSS. Both experienced some explorer crashes. However recently I had to remove FSS from my x64 box since it was using dynamic disks, which FSS has now explicitly blocked. I have not had a recent explorer crash... although I can't remember having.. maybe as it was x64.

I do still have FSS on an x86 box which is experiencing explorer.exe crashes.

I just pinged my son who has the failing box and he said "every time i try to open a folder e.g downloads, documents after abt 30 seconds, it crashes"

I'll figure out more info tonight. I could (should?) also open up a connect issue on it.

#2 Nigel Jones (Homepage) on 2007-12-18 11:48 (Reply)

Please do open a Connect issue. I think there may be one already open, so please double check.

As a weird sidenote/update to this post, I upgraded one of my XP SP2 boxes to SP3 RC and the problem went away on that machine. I'm not sure what exactly changed but I suspect there is a "bad" DLL out there that is conflicting with FSS.

I could be wrong, and it is a weird one to try to debug when it happens.

#2.1 Aaron Tiensivu (Homepage) on 2007-12-21 19:44 (Reply)

I've not opened a connect issue first as I need to get SP1 RC back on there, which is failing - issue open on that. Once addressed I'll retest the explorer issue.

#2.1.1 Nigel Jones on 2007-12-22 05:54 (Reply)

I must admit since onecare AV still has trouble with dynamic disks (on my x64 system) and since FS has problems as above on x86, I'm thinking about ditching fs
- Use avast for AV
- stick to simple OpenDNS obfuscation for site access

#2.1.1.1 Nigel Jones on 2007-12-31 12:47 (Reply)

I'm quite a fanboy of ESET's NOD32 antivirus. Depending on what system it is at home, I use either NOD32 or OneCare.

Knock on wood/plastic, I haven't had any issues with either of them, but I don't have any dynamic disks under x64 with OneCare on them.

OneCare 2.0 seems a lot more mature than 1.x

#2.1.1.1.1 Aaron Tiensivu (Homepage) on 2007-12-31 15:27 (Reply)

one care family safety
did this come when i uploaded the windows browser7?im techno.challenged,any can you help me uninstall one care.
my machine crashes and i cant acess games or a 2nd live site.
thanks!!
scott

#3 scott holcombe (Homepage) on 2007-12-20 17:18 (Reply)

I recently installed this on a new system and experienced regular crashes of windows explorer. It would happen almost immediately whenever I tried to do something in explorer or if I opened two instances of explorer. Finally tracked it down to OneCare Family Safety and removed it. I would like to use this, so I hope they get this resolved in a version soon.

#4 Mark Brubaker on 2007-12-26 15:24 (Reply)

I have XP SP2 with FSS and I am no longer able to open a mapped directory or external USB drive without explorer.exe crashing 90% of the time.

It is really a dissapointment since this software is exactly what I needed for my children's computer.

Is there an official reply from Microsoft yet? My only solution is to remove the software at this point

#5 Frank Cadena on 2007-12-29 10:36 (Reply)

MS has released a fix for this issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946758

I have not tried this fix yet. since I had uninstalled the software. I just downloaded their new LiveOne (version 2008) and added teh FSS component. Explorer has not crashed yet (will see, too early to tell).

#5.1 Frank Cadena on 2008-01-28 23:15 (Reply)

I recently bought a new pc with vista already installed and unknowingly did all the updates and activated my fancy new Family Safety. My explorer crashed continuously to the point of being unuseable. I searched the internet high and low for an answer... everything from disabling some shell extensions and checking for incompatible control panel software.
Here, finaly, after two weeks of searching, your site came up. I uninstalled FSS and now my system runs without a single explorer crash in two days. I came back this morning to your site to say thanks.

Andrew

#6 Andrew on 2008-01-11 08:08 (Reply)

I uninstalled onecare family safety gave me an error during the uninstall and now i have lost all internet connectivity, i have tried winsock repairs ect. just can't surf.

#7 Ron on 2008-04-01 12:38 (Reply)

Sorry to sound negative, but the app(s) that probably has caused the most problems has been the livecare suite
- very late support for 64 bit
- initially worked, then blocked when using dynamic disks
- explorer crashes
- poor performance (av)
- compatability issues (lots of files being opened at once)

A rather underwhelming experience. I've moved "back" to using Avast & light parental pseudo-blocking via OpenDNS

#8 Nigel Jones (Homepage) on 2008-04-01 14:12 (Reply)

I had this program family safety on our computer,
But my son tried to take it out by deleting some files,
now im stuck with a computer that cant conect to the internet, and ive tried alot of stuff.
Manual registry removal an such.
but nothing, it stopped complaneing about not alowing conection to the internet , but it still wount alow it.
we bought the comp cheap with it already installed by the unknown previous owner.
So what to do now?

#9 kjell on 2008-07-22 17:39 (Reply)

There's a simple answer. Firster I though problem was windows defender on vistra home premium lap top. So I had to turn off nortons intrusion prevention to use explorer. The answer is to unistall msn family safety. If you can't do it, as anti virus technician.
These problems don't effect xp on my desk top.

#9.1 Kevin Murphy (Homepage) on 2009-05-03 14:18 (Reply)

I recently downloaded and installed an update for Windows Live Family Safety. When I rebooted and opened up Windows Explorer to access the internet, I noticed that it was lockied into trying to access the following domain: http://g.live.com/...... (I don't recall the rest). No matter what I've tried I can't get it to quit. It cannot access the domain, and won't stop trying. I've tried uninstalling Windows Live, I've tried typing in another domain, I've tried System Restore which will work on all other updates but the one I'm having trouble with. I've had to go to the local library to post this and look for solutions. Anyone got one?

#10 Ashley on 2009-05-21 19:32 (Reply)

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