Applications that can Interfere with DXLab Applications

When some applications are installed -- notably anti-malware applications -- they configure Windows to automatically start them when Windows starts. To determine whether an application being automatically started by Windows is interfering with your DXLab applications, boot windows into Safe Mode with Networking as described below. If booting Windows into Safe Mode with Networking and then starting the affected DXLab applications eliminates the slow startup and slow performance, enables interoperation, or restores access to the internet, that's a strong indication of interference by one of the applications that Windows is configured to automatically start when booted normally. Note that when Windows is booted into Safe Mode with Networking, device drivers are not loaded, so Commander won't be able to communicate with your transceiver(s) and DXView won't be able to communicate with your antenna rotator.

Booting Windows into Safe Mode with Networking

A DXLab application that starts up promptly in Safe Mode with Networking but takes much longer to start up when Windows has been booted normally indicates that one of the applications or services by automatically started by Windows is responsible for the behavior.

Determining Which Applications are being Started Automatically by Windows

To determine what applications Windows is configured to automatically start when Windows is booted normally,

To determine the functionality and provenance of an application that Windows is configured to automatically start, see this searchable database .

Finding the Culprit

To identify which of several possible applications is interfering,

  1. disable the automatic startup of all applications, and reboot Windows; confirm that no interference is present
  2. enable the automatic startup of one of the previously automatically-started applications, and reboot Windows
    • if no interference is present, repeat step 2
    • if interference is present, the last enabled application is the culprit

You can use the Startup tab in Microsoft's MSConfig tool to enable and disable startup applications.

Configuring an Anti-malware Application to Consider Each of your DXLab Applications to be Safe

  1. read the documentation for the anti-malware application
  2. if the documentation doesn't provide a sufficient explanation, contact the help desk of the anti-malware application's provider
  3. if you are unable to obtain timely assistance from the help desk, consider switching to a more competent anti-malware application provider

Additional Notes

Malwarebytes de Bill G4WJS

The Malwarebytes premium version protects Internet service ports by monitoring traffic, if it sees traffic going to a local server that it does not know about it grabs that port and sits on it so no other applications can run a service on that port. It can be very confusing as the first packet of information will be delivered then the service trying to use the port then gets blocked by the Malwarebytes service that hijacks the port. This can be hard to trace using normal system tools as the hijacked port is held by a Windows service process that cannot be easily attributed to Malwarebytes.

To diagnose this, use the 'netstat -abn' command from an Administrator command prompt and check the output for the port the non-working service application is expected to be listening on. If the listening process is shown as svchost.exe then a Windows service is using the port. The final step is to move the non-working service to another free port and if that too then appears to be in use by a svchost.exe process then Malwarebytes is probably the culprit.


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Installing DXLab Applications

Getting Started with DXLab

ApplicationInteference (last edited 2022-09-27 19:29:23 by AA6YQ)