LANDesk Antivirus Update and High CPU Usage

I had a phone conference with LANDesk today regarding the issues we’re having.

Without going into much detail, here is what I found out:

High CPU for View virtual machines: It is looking more and more that the tmsvc.exe is the main cause of the CPU spikes. LANDesk is treating this as high priority to come up with a patch. The ETR for this patch is sometime next week; possibly by mid-week.

LANDesk Antivirus for Windows 2000: I found out that the main reason why LANDesk isn’t currently supporting Windows 2000 OS, is because Kaspersky (the company), decided to completely phase out its support in its latest 8.0 antivirus engine.

LANDesk realized that a lot of people are still using Windows 2000 OS in their environments (duh), and decided to re-write the code to support it on their own within the agent; Hence its release in SP1. Their ETR for this one is the release of SP1, which, according to the A/V manager at LANDesk may not be until sometime in April. Of course, that is quite far, considering we have an imminent threat with the KIDO virus floating around.

Aside from the ETR, I don’t have any more information. LANDesk will be having a meeting with their VPs to come up with an action plan to help us with our A/V issue. One of the considered and potentially quite creative solutions, would be for them to create us standalone 8.8 agent that has the antivirus which contains a definition for KIDO that actually removes the virus completely. This is just an idea at this point. I will have more information on Monday as we reconvene to get an update.

Meanwhile, please hang in there, and I will pass on any new information about these 2 issues as soon as I receive it from LANDesk.