Thursday, July 16, 2020

Trend Micro Worry Free Business - very slow opening of apps

We recently switched from Webroot to Trend Micro Worry Free (I now believe this was a mistake).  Almost immediately I started getting reports of "computer slowness" and started noticing this myself.  Primarily I had issues with Onedrive having issues synchronizing, opening Chrome and Edge (chromium) very slow, clicking links in emails (again opening browsers) slow, logging into Windows after a reboot long delay, slow loading of additional tabs / webpages, and other areas.

This appears to be a well known issue when using Trend Micro with "Unauthorized Change Prevention Service".  Watching the task manager when doing many of the tasks and I could see this service jump to the top.
Unfortunately, many of the TM options are dependent on this service, but at the end of the day I'm a firm believer that machines need to be speedy, so I disabled the service.  Note: I also disabled the Behavior Monitoring as this is dependent on the service.

If you're reading this while "thinking" of moving to Trend Micro I would advice you to take a test drive first.  I've found several issues which support is working through, but it's been a bumpy road.

  1. Extreme slowdown when scheduled scans run (as opposed to what we're used to seeing with Webroot).
  2. Unauthorized Change Prevention Service slowdown.
  3. Issue with builds prior to 6.7.1319 being unable to restore to domain OU's.
  4. Issue with many of our installs prior to 6.7.1319 being unable to update to latest build automatically - support still looking into issue.