Hi, I'm the main tester for a new racing system (JustRace) and we are working on adding support for RaceRoom to the portal. We have hit a problem. We run the RaceRoom dedicated server software and after approx 24hours we get the following error on our server: I've added the highlight. If I look in the highlighted folder for "protect.exe" that file no longer exists: If I restart the RaceRoom dedicated server then the file is restored and we are ok for another 24hours approx. The system is windows 10. No antivirus software apart from what is built into windows. No antivirus alerts (checked every time the file goes missing). We have also tried with AV disabled. Does anyone have any ideas? This is the last hurdle for us to launch the new JustRace system with RaceRoom support but at the moment it is causing us major reliability issues. There are no crashdumps in "Documents\My Games\SimBin\Crash Dumps" presumably because it is not the raceroom game but the dedi. I do have logs for the RaceRoom Dedi that I can supply if needed. Just let me know which ones are useful.
Hi, this error message indicates a driver conflict in the protect.exe under Windows 10. Please try this: - Remove all protection components from the system: Download the zip-archive of the SFREMOVE utility. Unpack the archive and save the sfdrvrem.exe file to some folder on the hard disk. Run sfdrvrem.exe. Follow the displayed instructions. - Then update the protection driver: Download the zip-archive of the SFUPDATE utility. Unpack the archive and save the sfdrvup.exe file to some folder on the hard disk. Run sfdrvup.exe. Follow the displayed instructions Please let us know whether this improved the situation.
Thanks trying it now and will report back. Might take a day or so to confirm if the issues continues or is resolved.
On running the remove I get this after a brief pause: Then I ran the update and got this: The machine is a windows 10 machine with fresh install of windows on it and just RaceRoom and Automobilista installed. It is a dedicated server so has never run the game itself just the dedi software (if that makes a difference) If I run the update program on my normal "gaming" machine I get the same message about "no installed protection drivers found to update". Just tried this to see what it reported.
That shouldn't make a difference. Thanks for giving the suggestion a shot, sorry it didn't work. What's weird is that the protect.exe seems to vanish or gets removed. Apparently Windows 10 does have a bit of a reputation of files or folders going missing (just google sth like "win 10 temp files disappearing"), so it could be Win10 related. AfaIk in-house machines don't run on Win 10 and I haven't heard of that problem with those servers until now. Hard to tell remotely, but there's a number of possible soft solutions to such issues. Just one quick example here which does include some steps that don't apply in your case but it might be worth to check options 6-8: https://windowsreport.com/my-files-folders-disappeared-windows-10/
Ok. So going to use Process Monitor to watch the folder and see what is accessing it and what is using it when it is removed. I'll report back.
Just reporting back the probable cause. So Microsoft updated the old disk clean-up tool (around since XP) that would try to get disk space back when you started to run low (low disk space warning messages). They updated it to "Storage Sense" in Oct 2018. Storage sense is disabled and always has been on my machine but despite this process monitor reported that "cleanmgr.exe" had deleted protect.exe a few hours ago. I dug around and found that cleanmgr.exe is the legacy disk clean-up tool. I checked scheduled tasks and low and behold I found a schedule still existing for a silent run of disk clean-up. Now my windows 10 machine was installed AFTER the update to storage sense yet somehow still has the legacy disk clean-up tool with a scheduled task. I have disabled the task but it looks very likely this was the cause. Just documenting it here in case others with windows 10 (or other version) ever have this issue. Here is the task you need to disable: Thanks for the support!
Hi @J-turn nice catch, thank you very much for taking the time to report your findings. I'll keep this info in mind in case this issue comes up again. Best regards and good luck to you and everyone involved with JustRace.