DEP shutting down Host Process for Windows Services!!!

**I'm not 100% sure if this is the right forum for this post...but mods please move it to where it's supposed to be if not here.**

Here's my situation...

Every so often (usually after my computer is sitting idle for a few hours) I get this popup message on my SZ160 + Vista Biz that says "Host Process for Windows Services has stopped and was closed." or something very close to that. When I click on the help icon in the sys tray it opens the Windows Help and tells me that the Data Execution Prevention closed the process. Theres no way to disable DEP on Vista that I've found...and I've read online that people haven't had any luck trying to disable DEP (boot up problems result).

I was wondering if anyone has this issue in Vista (seems to be all versions of Vista...not just biz) or if anyone has a solution to it? It doesn't seem to disable any functionality that I can tell...but it's just annoying because it pops up all the time.

Thanks in advance,
Jeff

 

I cant remember the exact error message, but I think I have had something like this - after I deleted the history and temp files in my browser (IE7).

 

have you looked in the event viewer?

 

One solution could be to simply find out which service causes the problem, and then ditch that.

Properly written software shouldn't trigger DEP.
If it does, you should (if possible), find alternative software that doesn't cause the problem.

(At least, in a perfect world. I am aware that in the real work, that may not be possible. I've had to put a few apps under XP on my DEP whitelist because they'd otherwise trigger it)

 

http://vista.beyondthemanual.com/2006/11/vista_tip_turn_off_data_execut.html

true

cheers ...

 

i had this samething happen. the first time i ignored it but i could not use my fingerprint reader about the same time. the program ran but i could not get it to read the fingerprint to get on to anything. after reloading the software for the fingerprint it worked.

then i got the host process error again. and again the fingerprint read would not work. so i turned off the protection that causes the problem and rebooted and now the fingerprint reader worked without reloading the program.

so why would microsoft think that the fingerprint read software is mal-ware? hope this helps. i found the cmd statement to turn off the protection.

 

The data execution protection stops a program when it tries to access memory outside of the range it is assigned. Sounds like the drivers are poorly written for your fingerprint reader.

On a side note. I had this happen to Windows Explorer in XP where DEP closed it to "protect the system". I made sure to screenshot it.