How to fix Vista’s Security Center from reporting missing or duplicate programs
The Windows Security Center which is included with Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista is a nice way of seeing the security status overview of your system but sometimes it makes mistakes after you have uninstalled one or more programs and replaced them with others. Here’s how to correct those problems with Security Center.
Sometimes, after you have uninstalled a firewall, antivirus or malware detection program the entry remains because the uninstaller failed to remove the entry from the Security Center either by design or just sloppy coding. Either way, you are not stuck and this is easily fixed.
You will need to force the operating system to repair Windows Management Instrumentation, before proceeding, create a restore point because if you mess up here, worse things can happen.
Launch System restore
Click Open System Protection
Select the “System” drive and click Create
Give your restore point a name…
And click Create one last time. The system will create your restore point and now in case there are any problems you will be able to recover the system (well, hopefully, anyway). Now let’s get on with sorting out Security Center, shall we?
Go to the start search box and type “services” (without quotes) and press enter.
The next screen you see will be a complete list of services, startup types and whether or not the service is started. Look for the entry “Windows Management Instrumentation” (WMI – highlighted in red) and make note that the service status is started.
In order to proceed you will need to pause the WMI service so double click the entry and click the “Pause” button.
It will take a few seconds for Windows to pause the service so wait until it completes before proceeding. Leave the services dialog box open. Now you need to proceed to your Windows directory and delete a specific folder. DO NOT delete ANY OTHER folder except the one that is specified.
Head to your “C:” drive or whichever drive Windows has been installed to and boots from. Go to the Windows directory…
Once inside the Windows directory locate the System32 folder and proceed into it… (make sure that you have entered the System32 folder and NOT the system folder)
Inside the System32 folder you will find the wbem directory so, yes, you need to go into another one, we’re almost done.
In wbem you will find a folder named Repository which contains information that is reported to the Security Center such as which programs are installed, firewall status, etc. As I said at the beginning after installing and uninstalling different security programs, these entries can become corrupted and report false information to the Security Center.
With your Services dialog box still open, check and make sure that the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service is still paused, if it is, proceed, if not, go back and follow the steps to pause the service. Once you are sure the service is paused, go ahead and delete the repository folder and make sure ONLY to delete the repository folder, DO NOT delete any other entries.
Yes, I did say to delete the repository folder, see it, sitting right there, delete it, I mean it, do it now, did you do so, okay. Now, go back to your services dialog box and remember how the WMI service is paused, well, it’s time to start it up again so double click the Windows Management Instrumentation entry once more and click Resume.
This step forces Windows to redo the inventory of your installed security applications (firewall, antivirus and the like) and rebuild the Security Center index. It will take a few moments for the service to Resume. Remember that repository folder you deleted, well, you will now note that it has magically been created again with a new inventory of what’s installed (the files are Vista specific and are not meant to be understood by us mere mortals).
The Security Center may still be reporting the wrong information but that’s okay, sometimes you have to restart in order for all the changes to take effect. After you have performed all these steps (and optionally restarted if the changes did not take immediate effect), you will note that the Security Center is almost barren at first, this means it is retrieving the new information and will take a few moments before the new data is displayed. Once fully initiated, the Security Center should now be displaying the correct information as to what programs are installed and functioning.
If you have followed these instructions to the exacting letter, there should be no problems. If you did somehow manage to mess anything up, there’s that restore point we created earlier and depending on how much of a mess you created, may have to be accessed in safe mode but that’s another post for another time.
These instructions can be followed with little modification for Windows XP SP2 users as well.
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March 2nd, 2008
Thank you! You’ve saved my day. I’ve been trying to solve it for more than two days and this trick did it in 10 minutes. Wonderful!!!
March 11th, 2008
Just wanted to report a scam using your name.
They call them selves (microsoft security depart-
ment (RSA) <remittancedivision1@yahoo.co.uk
I would not have opened the email they sent me’
except it was labled as a microsoft security allert.
And it says that Bill Gates founded the email lottery drawing, Just thought you should know about it. and this was the most likely place I could find. Thank you.
April 18th, 2008
Tks very much.
I had Comodo Firewall Pro (free version) installed and tried to uninstall it after buying Zonealarm and yet Vista still reports it to be there.
After following your instructions, it seem to be working fine now. The Vista nightmare continues. This had to the worst as I am running WinXP, Ubuntu, Mac OS 10.5 and thought give Vista a try. What a disappointment – I expected some problems, I was not disappointed.
Zonealarm is working fine after following your advice.
Thanks for the selfless information
April 25th, 2008
Thanks i have tried everything but with your advice everything is fine now.
May 11th, 2008
Thanks big time this sorted out my problem, was nervous about the delete but it worked.
July 21st, 2008
thanks, it worked. cleared vista security center of erroneous reporting that zone alarm and comodo are still active, removed them a long time ago.
August 30th, 2008
After a reboot, It worked just fine here.
Thank you.
September 19th, 2008
Many thanks, after a reboot – problem sorted
September 15th, 2009
Hi, i tried your advice and did not work. i am using windows xp sp3. displayed the following message: can not delete the repository folder. the file index.btr is being used by another person or program.
thanks
November 17th, 2009
Thought i would put it out there in the hopes it would help someone else, there is another way you can resolve this issue and you do not have to delete any files.
What is happening is the Windows Management Instrumentation repository Service files/folders ends up getting corrupted at some point and it starts reporting incorrectly. This can also interfere with installing some software like mssql server, service packs and many other bits of software.
So, what you can do is force it to rebuild these by clicking on start and selecting run and typing CMD and hitting enter. This will open up a command prompt. Once it does you will see something like this.
C:\Users\Tnt>
They used to call that a dos prompt back when it was what everyone knew and used. If the path is different like C:\Windows\System32 or even something else it does not matter. Once you have the command prompt your going to type 2 commands, the first one will most likely fail, we are expecting that but if you get something other than what we expect that is very important to know. WRITE IT DOWN word for word if you get some other kind of failure message…So the first command your going to run you are going to type exactly as you see it below;
winmgmt /verifyrepository
So your command prompt should look something like this before you hit enter although the username will be whatever user your logged in as if that is the path your in.
C:\Users\Tnt>winmgmt /verifyrepository
You will most likely generate a message something to the effect of “WMI repository is inconsistent”, this means the WMI local repositories have gotten corrupted.
You can easily rebuild them by running this at the command prompt next:
winmgmt /salvagerepository
When you run the first command the first time it might take a few seconds to minutes before you see the failure message. I would wait perhaps a minute or two if you see quite a bit of hard drive activity when your doing this.
When you run it the second time you might even see something that says
C:\winmgmt /salvagerepository
WMI repository salvage failed
Error code: 0×8007041B
Facility: Win32
Description: A stop control has been sent to a service that other running services are dependent on.
If it does fail just wait a bit and run it again. Then you should see.
C:\Windows\Tnt>winmgmt /salvagerepository
WMI repository has been salvaged
This might take up to a few minutes to complete the second time around but once it does, you can reboot and go back into the security center and it should now be reporting everything correctly.
Hope that helps someone, Actually kind of know it will that is why im sharing it.
Tnt