Retrospect Causing Clock Time Loss and Mouse Lag Time

[Guest]

Whenever I backup (about 8GB) to CD my computer clock loses time (often 2 or 3 hours) during the process and my mouse lags dramatically. After several hours of backup my entire system is running at a snails pace and by the end I am forced to do a "cold boot" just to get things up and running normal again. It only happens when using Retrospect v.6. I shut down everything else completely including my firewall and anti virus software, clean out all temp files, run scan disk, disk cleanup, defrag, etc. I'm using W98se, have lots of free Hard Drive, 384MB Rambus Ram and have no problems with other software causing similar problems (not even my Photoshop). Other than when using Retrospect my clock, my mouse, my computer and software run great. Any thoughts on why Retrospect is Problematic and how to rectify the problem.

[kaikow]

An analogous, perhaps, problem used to be caused by Norton Auntie Virus a few years ago.

Aftre I, and others, pointed out the problem, Symantec, after many months of denial and finger pointing, came up with a solution.

 

The underlying effect of the problem can still be seen in Win 2000 if NAV is installed.

I do not know the exact cause, but here are the symptoms that were seen.

 

1. Periodically, the system clock would change in increments of an hour, either forward or backward. I only saw the change forward, but others state they saw the change backwards too.

 

2. When it came time for the OS to automatically adjust the System Clock for Daylight/Standard Time, the adjustment would occur, but you would not get the usual message informing you that the time had been automatically changed.

 

My theory, which appears to have been true, but never acknowledged by Symantec, is that somehow Norton Auntie Virus was causing the OS to believe that it was time to adjust the clock for Daylight time, but no informational message was issued.

 

After months of beating up on Symantec, they finally issued a program fix that fixed the time changing problem, HOWEVER, Win 2000 still does not display the message that the time had changed when changing for Daylight/Standard time.

 

Interestingly, tonight such a change should occur.

 

Coincidentally, just yesterday, on my multiboot Win 2000 system, I began migrating my main apps to a new Win 2000 partition, on which I installed Office 2003 yesterday. I have not yet migrated Retrospect to that partition. The partition has NAV 2003.

 

On a multiboot system, one must take care to allow only 1 OS to reset the clock for Daylight/Standard time, and I have set that to be the new OS partition, so tonight may prove to be interesting.

 

Symantec, as far as I know, never stated what was the cause of the problem. It's hard to imagine what NAV could have been doing to cause Win 2000 to believe that it was necessary to change the system cclock for Daylight/Standard time and not issue the message that it had done so.

 

The other possibility is that the NAV processes that get automatically launced at Startup were somehow stealing enough CPU cycles to cause the clock to go awry. However, I don't buy that because the probability of that happening in increments of an hour AND causing the warning message to not appear when the clock was automatically changed because of Standard/Daylight time, seems a bit far feteched.

 

Perhaps, Retrospect is causing the same thing to occur, or not.

[kaikow]

I did see a problem tonight with the adjustment for Standard time.

 

I also recall, that there was a significant program update to Norton Auntie Virus recently, which had at least 1 significant bug, and was replaced the next day, or so, by another update and then there was yet another update a few days ago.

 

In any case, here's what I saw tonoght.

 

On a multiboot system, only 1 of the systems is set to adjust automatically for Daylight/Standard time.

 

I was booted to that system and witnessed the time correctly being adjusted back 1 hour.

However, to throw a monkey wrench in this, tho I believe it to be irrelevant to the problem I saw, I then ran Windows update.

 

The only updates were the two recent Windows Media Player updates.

I also ran Live Update to get the 24 Oct 2003 updated virus definitions for NAV.

 

Next, I booted to each of the other OS and ran live update and Windows Update.

 

While booted to the last OS, I noticed that the clock had been again set back one hour.

I do not know when that happened, or which OS caused the change to happen.

 

So I manually corrected the time ahead 1 hour.

 

When I next booted to the latest OS, i.e., the one that is set to automatically adjust the time, the clock was again back one hour.

 

So something is wrong someplace.

Retrospect is on only one of the OS partitions, not the latest partition.

I am in the process of migrating stuff to the latest partition, so Retrospect will be moved in the next few daze.

 

Because of the experience I described in my other posting in this thread, I suspect that this problem is again due to NAV, given the recent program changes.

 

A few years ago, it was relatively easy to discuss such problems in the Symantec forums, and a bunch of us kept banging on Symantec til it was fixed.

 

Now, Symantec no longer has discussion forums, so its harder to find out if others have seen the same problem, not to mention the tech support is not free.