I booted up my laptop today and the Microsoft Security Essentials icon was red--shut off. I opened the window, tried to turn it back on, and the program quit responding. Then I remembered that the computer has been occasionally running really slow for the past couple days, and I've been randomly kicked offline fairly frequently for the past several weeks. I was a bit freaked out, went online to search for an explanation, and later realized that it had turned back on by itself.

Anyone know what might be going on? Does MSE *usually* take a minute or so to start up, and I just never noticed before? I can't imagine, but the fact that it turned on by itself made me wonder. I had it do a quick scan, which found nothing. I have Malwarebytes running right now, so we'll see if that turns up anything. I'm a little confused.

If MSE is off and showing a red icon at startup, but it turns green/good on it's own after a short delay, you have a resource issue -- that is, other startup items are consuming processor power, memory, and disk access. All of this causes a delay in MSE fully starting up and successfully reporting status back to the operating system.
The other performance issues you are reporting can be due to all kinds of things -- a failing drive, low disk space, low memory, lots of background programs, even malware that has made it past MSE.
What are the specifications for this machine? What version of Windows is running? How old is the machine? Has the performance issue just recently surfaced?

-steve

_________________
stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"