"Error while receiving from the COM port" with AV

[Anonymous]

I receive the above error when i turn on my Antivirus - let it be Mcafee or Pc-Cillin , the result is still the same. But once i disbale the anitvirus software, the error won't appear. I have already try swaping the loop back tester for com 1 and com 2 . The result still the same.

I have check with the antivirus technical support. They told me that their software has nothing to do with the COM port.

can anyone help me on this? How to solve this problem.

Thanks
mhgee

[David (PassMark)]

No one has reported this problem before. It also doesn't happen on our test machines.

Can you leave BurnInTest running for a while with just the COM port test
active, and wait until you have seen the error a few times. Then save a log file (from the File menu) in HTML format and E-mail it to me. There are some extra error codes in the detailed log that might help to idenify what the problem is on your machines.

It would also help to know what version of Windows you are running, what version of BurnInTest you are using, how often you see the error, what baud rate you are testing at and if the COM ports appear to correctly installed from the Windows device manager.

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David
Passmark

[David (PassMark)]

[GOT THE LOG FILE]

After your first E-Mail, I thought you got this error 100% of the time. After seeing the log file I can see that it is an intermittent problem.

We have seen problems like this before. In a past case we did a long investigation with National Semiconductors, the manufacturers of Super I/O chips that drive the serial ports. In the end (after a month of testing) we found a problem in the BIOS. In their case, when the Floppy disk and serial ports were used at the same time the serial port would sometimes get disabled in the BIOS. National Semiconductors corrected this problem more than 6 months ago, but we saw a similar issue with a Taiwanese manufacturer and I suspect they put it into the "too hard" basket.

Like your case it only happened from time to time, at random, during long test runs. Sometimes they would get serial port errors and sometimes floppy disk errors.

You might find that the anti-virus software affects the low level speed of the disk access and provokes this bug, which would not normally be seen due to timing differences. (this is just a guess, we have no proof of this).

As you only saw 1 error in 4 hours, I guess you need to decide how much effort is justified in hunting it down. After seeing the log I am fairly confident that this is not a bug in BurnInTest.

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David
Passmark

[David (PassMark)]

Another possibility is that the Antivirus software slows down the machine to such a degree that the COM port is experiencing a timeout error. So you need to make sure the timeout value in the BurnInTest preferences window is set to be long enough for when the machine is under high load.

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David
PassMark