Windows 10 Notification Bug – Check Virus Protection

anti-virusgroup-policywindows

I have a bit of an issue on a Windows 10 Pro Machine on the Anniversary update with Trend Micro Installed. For some unknown reason I get this popup about every 5 minutes up to a total of about 200+ times per day:

Error Message In Action Centre

Normally being a long time windows user I’m used to annoyances like this. But this is driving me up the wall.

Here is where it gets annoying, I know I can disable Action Center, using the following key

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
"DisableNotificationCenter"=dword:00000001

But, my users actually use the quick commands in there. So that’s all good, but since windows 10 there is no registry settings to disable specific notifications. So then I thought I should check Group Policy for some more clues about what I could do to stop it. No dice, the only thing Group Policy will let me do is disable Action Centre completely but again; That’s not really useful.

I then decided to do some more digging and what I came across was this under Security and Maintenance > Change Security and Maintenance Settings:

Change Notifications In Action Centre

Annoyingly enough I am more than 100% that turning off those two settings will stop these Notifications.

Those of you who are paying paticular attention will note that Spyware and unwanted software protection is actually greyed out (yay). Which means I can’t turn it off. I had then found the source of the issue to be this service:

Security Center (wscsvc)

So that then made that tick box ungreyed and I was able to turn the annoying notification off. All well and good apart from the fact that it worked on two machines out of the 20 that have this problem; on the rest of the Windows 10 clients it makes no difference whether the Security Center serivce is enabled or disabled; started or stopped the tickbox just stays greyed the whole entire time.

Has anyone got any ideas on this one?

Kind Regards,
Tactical

Best Answer

Hi yes we are seeing this incorrect SecurityCenter popup with Trend Micro/Win10 Anniversary update as well. It's actually not specific to TM, when Googling around I saw reports from users of other third-party AV products also. If you pull up the Application event logs on a system showing this behavior, you should see a lot of SecurityCenter errors saying things along these lines:

Error while updating Trend Micro OfficeScan Anti-spyware status to SECURITY_PRODUCT_STATE_ON (error BA060000)

Below is a good Trend-specific thread on this. If you read the last post, it sounds like getting your Trend environment fully patched up should resolve this. Our agents are still showing build number 5010, so I'm trying to get our Trend admin folks to get things up to date.

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1788898-win-10-build-1607-causing-issues-with-trend-micro

That's a lot more elegant than disabling the Win10 notification functionality IMO. I would actually like my users to be notified if they are running without AV protection.