It’s a nice feature, assuming you want MSE on task. It logs a message in the System Event log claiming failure, then immediately falls back on its own components and gets the updates done successfully and logs another event claiming success. This Windows 7 machine hasn’t had the Windows Update service enabled in a long time. Note the up-to-date status in the Security Essentials dialog. Note the green marks next to “OS – Microsoft Malware Protection Command Line Utility ( MpCmdRun.exe) indicating successful communications. Please allow me to offer this screen grab as evidence. Microsoft Security Essentials updates just fine when Windows Update is disabled. I have also been monitoring communications and system health for a long time. I have been disabling the Windows Update service for eons in order to ensure I retain control. My observations early this morning lead me to believe that Windows Defender is NOT updated if wuauserv is disabled. I am now vulnerable.Īpproximately 18 minutes later MsMpEng gets an update and I now show that update on my history log.įor those of you who know the inner workings of wuauserv, the Windows Update service…

futz around a few minutes, then a reboot and Viola! MsMpEng is running and in Active Protection mode. I actually picked up the last update for WD on March 27th, 2017 (I disabled my AV to install something.) A pre-check of MsMpEng shows this morning that it’s NOT updated after forcing a WU check, nor does it appear in the Update History at any time for the last month. I run a product called Vipre AV for Enterprise. So there is a period of time between when MsMpEng starts, and when it gets patched that a user would be vulnerable. After the next reboot, WD kicks ON and in my test just now, it’s not been patched yet.

what alarms me a little bit is how Windows 10 behaves if your AV is temporarily disabled. I am looking at my task manager now and I can see my own AV product running, but not the recently patched MsMpEng.

What I can tell you: when a third party AV product installs correctly on Windows 10 - MOST of them “disable” Windows Defender. This is likely the best question I have seen on the topic, and sadly.

Microsoft safety scanner stuck