Bitdefender prevented essential windows services from starting after Windows Update

Photo by Mike Zulu

Suddenly, after letting Windows Update install some important updates, I got a mountain of trouble when trying to log in to my laptop. I really had all sorts of troubles. I got a message saying that Windows was preparing my profile when I had entered my password. That felt strange. When it took an unusual amount of time before my desktop was displayed I was pretty certain something had gone wrong. The first thing I saw after logging in was a “Location not available” dialog. After that the problems just went on and on. Here is a list of things I actually tried to remedy my problems:

Location not available – desktop

My profile wasn’t available it seemed. It might have been related to corrupt access control lists. Some fixes for this problem is available here.

Start menu search not working

I tried searching for programs in the windows start menu as my programs wasn’t available in the usual way. The search produced no result at all! Others have had the same problems and found ways to fix it.

System event notification service was unavailable

Windows also notified me that it could not connect to the System event notification service. So searching for that gave some more things to try.

Group policy client service is unavailable

The Group policy client service was also unavailable. Due to this my rights to do stuff was very limited. Here is a short blog posts about how to fix that.

Getting frustrated

I ended up trying a lot of solutions. I started services manually but as soon as I restarted my machine all the problems reoccurred. I tried reverting to the last previous good configuration and reverting back to a restore point, but all the restore points had mysteriously disappeared. I modified keys using regedit, to no avail. I run several fixes like “gpupdate /force” and “chkdsk /x /r” but it was all in vain. As I surfed around, getting all the more inclined to try even the most obscure fixes from just about any site, I stumbleded upon a post in the symantec forum claiming that the symantec antivirus had something to do with problems starting windows services after a windows update. I didn’t use symantec myself but maybe my antivirus program was causing these problems?

Disabling Bitdefener

I disabled Bitdefender antivirus and restarted. And violà! Everything went back to normal! I made sure that all the windows updates were properly installed before enabling Bitdefender again. To my great displeasure all the problems reoccurred when restarting with Bitdefender enabled. I restarted again with Bitdefender disabled and everything went back to normal. So I downloaded and started using another antivirus instead. Problem solved.

So, if you get these kinds of issues on your pc after a windows update a quick test you can to is to disconnect your machine from the internet, disable your antivirus and restart windows. If that doesn’t cut it, the solutions I linked to above might be worth trying.