This program has been damaged, possibly by a bad sector of the hard drive or a virus

[TedHagstrom]

We had a system in for repair with lots of malware infections etc, only thing we could fix was bitpro reporting.

"This program has been damaged, possibly by a bad sector of the hard drive or a virus. Please reinstall it",

didn't matter which profile we were loged into or which version of bitpro we used, a full reload of windows corrected the issue, the same customer has now brought their notebook in for repair, after failing to clean the thousands of infections without damaging windows we also gave this system a fresh install of windows however it no gives the above mentioned error message, no matter which user profile we use or version of the program???, what are the know causes, or even better, solutions for this issue.

note: these are the only two systems we have ever seen display this error message with bitpro and it seems to be too much of a co-incidence that the same customer owns both systems??

[David (PassMark)]

This is a common error message that effect many programs (try a Google search for, "This program has been damaged" ).

My guess is that the virus on these machines are (not very effectively)infecting new software as you load it on to the machine, corrupting the executable. You should be very careful with the infected machines that you have, some the visuses can jump across LANs and onto key drives. You don't want to end up with your entire workshop infected.

I found several references on the web to a malware program called CoolWebSearch that causes this error. I am not sure how accurate this information is however.

After you have re-installed windows, try downloading a clean copy of BurnInTest from our site.

Update 1:
This was also seen on some of early beta releases of Windows Vista. But it seems to have been resolved in the newer beta releases.

Update 2:
It seems that some bugs in particular Anti-spyware software can also cause the error (bad sector of the hard drive or a virus). We have contacted the companies concerned and they seem conmitted to fixing the problem (read the posts below for details). In the meantime you might need to uninstall the Anti-spyware software or switch to other Anti-spyware products. This is very ironic as the Anti-spyware products turn out to do more damage to your system than the actual spyware.

[TedHagstrom]

Resolution ??

I believe we have solved the issue.
We had installed on this system as part of the reload the latest CA Vet internet security suite. and have found the error only occurs when the Anti spyware component of the suite is installed. uninstall it and all is fine.
reinstall and get either the error in the topic or
" Error while unpacking program, code LP5, please report to author"

This is the second antispyware program to interfere with BITPro. the other was PREVX but it least it told me it was stopping bitpro from running - but didn't give me any choice to overide and shutting PREVX fixed issue
didn't just get a "windows system error"

JUst uninstalled and reinstall for 5th and now appears to be OK ????

Oops, applied most recent update to CA antispyware and faults recurrs.
only reolsution apperars to be to run BITpro before we install CA antispyware

The version is CA internet security suite 2007

[David (PassMark)]

OK, we will try and report the issue to CA as a false positive and see if we get a response.

If possible can you,

1) State exactly which version(s) of Windows you used

2) Check version of the antispyware definition file (assuming CA has included a version number)

3) Go into the BurnInTest installation directory (C:\Program Files\BurnInTest) and right click on the bit.exe file, then select Properties / Digitial Signatures to verify that the executable has not been tampered with. You should see 'PassMark Software Pty Ltd' in the signature list.

[David (PassMark)]

We contacted Prevx. This was their answer,
===========
Hi, David

Thank you for letting us know about this. We have reviewed bit.exe internally and agree we should change this determination. Please let us known if there is any other program of your products were tagged as bad one.

Would you please advise your customers If this program is in their jail then please doubleclick on it to allow it to run, alternatively, they can query us via support.

Regards,
Prevx Support

[David (PassMark)]

Solution - This program has been damaged, possibly by a bad sector of the hard drive

We also got a response from CA.

They don't believe it is a false positive as such, but they do state there is an issue with their security suite that needs looking into.

Update 26/Oct/06: CA say they have found the problem and a new release will be available in about a week that should correct the issue.

[David (PassMark)]

Further update:
CA are now saying that this can be fixed with a registry entry change. It isn't clear if they are going to fix this properly or not now.

Anyway here is what they are suggesting.
1. Go to registries: HKLM\Software\ComputerAssociates\ITMRT
2. Go to HookExclude subKey.
3. Add bit.exe to the list
4. Reboot
This should fix the issue.

[brandaris]

Further update:
CA are now saying that this can be fixed with a registry entry change. It isn't clear if they are going to fix this properly or not now.

Anyway here is what they are suggesting.
1. Go to registries: HKLM\Software\ComputerAssociates\ITMRT
2. Go to HookExclude subKey.
3. Add bit.exe to the list
4. Reboot
This should fix the issue.

Hi I had same problem with my menugenerator, allwebmenu's
I added allwebmenus.ex tot the list of this registry entry, and now the program is running fine.
(mmm strange way of solving problems (edditing registry keys) infact)

[David (PassMark)]

I don't know much about CA's product and even less about allwebmenus, but you need to be very sure a program doesn't really have a Virus before you decide to tell the the anti-virus software not to check it.

We also got another E-mail from CA a few days back (27/Nov/06). It said.

"As promised a new release of CA antispyware 2007 have been build and now bitpro is not in conflict anymore. Sorry for the delay in releasing it but these are the times of bureaucracy. I have tried to my best to get a quick operation for your issue."

So I think this resolves the issue.

[David (PassMark)]

Rather annoyingly we found the same false positive problem with another one of our applications.

This time it was AOL users with the AOL's security suite reporting problems. It turns out that the Spyware portion of the AOL's security suite is really CA's antispyware product. So it isn't surprising that they suffer from the same problem.

We contacted Computer Associates again. This time we were told (3/Jan/07),

"I am working on that and am going to inform PPRT development team about this new issue. Anyway we are implementing a new approach which will not affect your software anymore and only some processes will be injected by PPRT SDK module.
In the meanwhile do not worry, I will prioritize your issue trying my best to solve it permanently."

So eventually the issue might be fully resolved. In the meantime you might want to consider uninstalling or disabling the CA / AOL antispyware product.

[David (PassMark)]

We are into our 3rd month of trying to get CA & AOL to fix things up. We have had some new information from a AOL product manager yesterday.

Here is the information from AOL,

"We have completed a development analysis of the root cause and we are now in the development stage with a fix that will update the current scanning engine version in the field to CA's version 24 which will solve the blocking problem.

Our target for pushing out this update to our users is now scheduled for Monday, January 29th."

But this better that we expected. We expected AOL to ignore the issue completely, but to their credit they appear like they might fix it.

[kmruss]

Don't want to de-rail this thread - but just another reason AOL - and especially it's software (albeit it's THIRD-PARTY software too) bite. That's about as nice as I can be on that. I've had way too many client issues with AOL software where we've had to completely uninstall their software to fix the problem - and then that usually winds up trashing something else on the system (network drivers/access etc.). Gotta love LAME-O-L.

[captcurzk]

Error while unpacking program, code LP5. Please report to author

Further update:
CA are now saying that this can be fixed with a registry entry change. It isn't clear if they are going to fix this properly or not now.

Anyway here is what they are suggesting.
1. Go to registries: HKLM\Software\ComputerAssociates\ITMRT
2. Go to HookExclude subKey.
3. Add bit.exe to the list
4. Reboot
This should fix the issue.

I'm not foud whole registery node!! Is there differen solution ths problem?

What I can do now because I have same problem? I'm new user in there! I haven't be Ca-AV!

[David (PassMark)]

You are resurrecting a thread from 5 years ago?

The company concerned, Computer Associates (CA) got out of the Anti-Virus business years ago.

There is no reason to think their advice to fix their old product would work when you aren't even using their product.

For more info on the LP5 error see this old post.