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January 22, 2009 • 9:04 pm 0

SuperAntiSpyware Causes Windows 7 Beta to Crash After Installation

I uninstalled my antivirus software before upgrading my Vista machine to the Windows 7 beta, but I forgot the antispyware software. That was a mistake because after the upgrade finished and it booted into Windows for the first time it decided to promptly do a reboot with a blue screen of death(BOD). The BOD flashed on the screen so fast that I couldn’t read it, but I was was able to boot into safe mode. This lead me to believe it was the antispyware, since that would be the only other program that was loading other than the OS.

The antispyware program is SuperAntiSpyware (SAS), which I really like, but won’t be using on Win7 until they get it working with it. What I did to fix the reboot loop, since I couldn’t see the error with the naked eye, was to use my digital camera to video the boot and then pause the video to read the error message. Here is a picture using the new Win7 snip tool after I fixed the problem and was able to use Win7.

You will notice the file SASKUTIL.SYS in the snippet. That is the file that was causing the OS to dump and with a little look up in safe mode I found it in the SuperAntiSpyware folder. This program does not uninstall in Safe mode, so what I did was move the SuperAntiSpyware folder into a different temp folder on the hard drive and reboot. Once I got it rebooted and the OS didn’t dump, I was able to move the folder back, install RevoUnistall and remove it completely. RevoUnistaller goes into the registry and finds leftover chunks of a program, I highly reccomend it.Everything seems to working fine now, but I will report more on my adventures into Win7.

Microsoft, Windows 7 Beta