Comments on: Trend Micro: Impressively Bad Customer Support

By: adam

adam — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:42:46 +0000

There’s an easy solution if they charge your card without your permission, and you can’t get ahold of anyone to issue a refund: call your credit card’s issuing bank and file a complaint. If you tell them that you’ve attempted to resolve the issue yourself with the merchant and they aren’t responding to you, they’ll side with you. Then you’ll get your money back and Trend Micro will get to deal with a chargeback, which will cost ‘em $25 or more and (if it happens often enough) hurts their relationship with their merchant-account bank.

By: John Pribyl

John Pribyl — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:40:01 +0000

To call Trend Micro’s Customer Support a “service” would be a joke. Every number one calls funnels them back to the same recording. Does anybody actually work at that company. They will automatically renew your subscription even after you cancel it and it is hell to get in touch with someone to reverse the charge. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM THIS COMPANY. They are no better than a phishing expedition!

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:27:19 +0000

That’s exactly the same behavior I’m seeing: hundreds of messages in the debugger, including ones triggered by mouse-move events. Unfortunately the Outlook Express trick you describe doesn’t help; I don’t even have Outlook Express installed on my PC, and as far as I can tell there’s no application-specific switch for the Anti-Spam toolbar in the version of Trend Micro’s product that I’m using. Trend Micro wrote and wants me to provide them with a debugger log from their debugging mechanism but I haven’t gotten around to doing it. I really have my doubts that gathering this data will produce a tangible result from them.

By: Robert

Robert — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:28:57 +0000

Hi Adam,

Thank you for posting your problems with Trend Micro’s product, and thank you, Richard, for the useful response. I had the same problem using Visual C++. The debugger would record the loading and unloading of a Trend Micro dll, apparently for every Windows message to the program, including mouse motion events, of which there can be thousands. Everytime I moved the mouse over my window, the debugger produced hundreds of messages.

I use Outlook instead of Outlook Express. In Trend Micro, I turned off Anti-Spam for Outlook, which did not help. Then I turned it off for Outlook Express, which fixed the problem. Then I turned it back on for Outlook, which so far seems to be ok. So I still have Anti-Spam in Outlook and I can now use the Microsoft debugger.

Thanks again to both of you for your help.

Robert

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 18:55:16 +0000

Hi Adam,
It is couple of weeks ago that I did this but my recollection was that the was somewhat resistant to my efforts to suppress it.
After I wrote my suggestion I had a look in Msconfig and in the startup section there is an entry for TMAS_OEMon. Disabling that is probably a more elegant way to do it, if doing it from the main console does not suppress it. The Procmon utility will show if it is still making a nuisance of itself.
I would have to say that the 2006 version of TM seemed to work reasonably well but the 2007 has been a big disappointment. But then the older I get the more I feel I am living in the movie Brazil, where technology just gets crappier and harder to use and more fragile, and, dare I say it, just a little bit fascisty. In fact from what I remember of the film, (seen 20+ years ago), it was remarkably prescient.
Richard

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 12:39:46 +0000

Wow, thanks a bunch for that. You’re right, it’s the Outlook toolbar that’s causing the problems. (In the version of the software I have, you can turn the toolbar on and off from the “Main Console”.)

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:57:36 +0000

Hi,
I have had this one with Delphi. What you need is a thing called tmas35-oe.exe (Outlook express). The problem in my case was caused by the antispam toolbar code. With this .exe you can install the toolbar and then uninstall it, and Delphi gets back to normal. Not having the anti spam toolbar was not a problem because my ISP filters it first automatically.
If you have procmon.exe you can watch TM wasting your time…
HTH
Richard