Q - I had not been able to run Elliott for the past two days. Each time when I run Elliott, I receive the following error:

See sample screen below:

A - After further investigation, this turns out to be a problem caused by the anti-virus. It is somewhat tricky in this case because, in the systray icons area, we chose to right click on the Malwarebytes icon and chose to "exit."  It did close the icon and we thought that disabled the anti-virus.  Then when we tried Elliott again, the problem still persisted.  Also, the problem does not happen to other users on the network that also use the same anti-virus. So we thought the problem is not related to the anti-virus.

After we investigated every other possibility, we still do not know why this happened, so we circled back to the anti-virus.  Then we found out that there's no way to disable Malwarebytes anti-virus on the client side.  You can only do so on the server, and we don't have the access. Only the IT, which is an outside vendor, has access.  We decided to go with a desperate measure by un-installing the Malwarebytes anti-virus.  After that, the problem was fixed.

Many strange Elliott problems are caused by anti-virus software.  But we recognize that it is a necessary evil since we can't trust the user to do everything right.  We highly recommend that users use Windows Defender, which is a free anti-virus software that comes with Windows.  Over the years, we have good experiences with it.  Even if Windows Defender causes an issue with Elliott, it is likely we can work with Microsoft to resolve it.  There are hundreds of anti-virus software vendors on the market.  Each one of them has their own unique rules on why they stop an application software.  It is just not possible for us to work with every one of them.  We really don't believe you need any third party anti-virus software that will make our support of Elliott more complicated.

EMK