Solved You don't have permission to shut-down this computer

[dsperber]

Yet another major tech news site discussing this subject, with {of course} the expected assortment of user replies and opinions.

Seems to say that users other than BitDefender also being affected, so there does seem to be more to the story.

Here is the article on The Register.

Here is the discussion thread on The Register.

 

[ThrashZone]

Strange that there isn't more interest or participation in this thread. I would think there would be more users affected.

Hi,
I believe most people are smart enough to not be in all that much of a hurry to install ms updates.


Even the original issue of black screen from using stretch for wallpaper was pretty funny

Not too many people actually resize wallpapers to the resolution of the monitor I suppose

 

[dsperber]

Hi,
I believe most people are smart enough to not be in all that much of a hurry to install ms updates.

It is not clear that any MS updates are responsible for this. For example, on my own two Win7 machines that last MS update applied was all the way back on January 15!! Nothing since then!

And yet, on Feb 6 when I went to reboot both of them, the shut down permission error first showed its ugly head. I must have rebooted one machine at least 10 times since Jan 15 and the other one at least 20 times, and never saw an issue of any kind (and there were now several, not just the shut down issue) until Feb 6.

So clearly there was something else going on and it wasn't due to an MS update.

Also, my own experience was that I could eliminate ALL of my multiple symptoms by uninstalling BitDefender (which pushes out updates multiple times per day, hence also being the most likely culprit... for me). And reinstalling BitDefender made the symptoms return.

Also, I didn't need to disable the two Adobe "genuine" services which ARE running on my machine (as I have several Adobe products installed) in order to made the symptoms disappear. I only needed to uninstall BitDefender. And the two Adobe services continue to run... but I have no symptoms. This all led me to believe that at least for me it was being caused by some update pushed out by BitDefender around Feb 6 or just a bit earlier (since I'd re-booted earlier that day, with no problem).

The use of GPEDIT to change that UAC variable is just a workaround, for that one shutdown symptom. But it seems to produce other new UAC-related "permission" prompts I never saw before, although simply pushing OK or NEXT or CONTINUE is all that is needed to complete the MOVE or DELETE. So it's really just an annoyance now, but a benign one. Nevertheless it never happened before changing that UAC variable, which let me continue running BitDefender and also be able to shutdown/restart normally.

But I did need to change Clockwise.exe to "run as administrator", in order to allow it to run normally again, with BitDefender installed. I don't need that if I uninstall BitDefender.

All of this points me to thinking it's BitDefender which is responsible. And yet, others around the world report the issues and they don't use BitDefender. Perhaps other anti-virus products and BitDefender are somehow all suddenly incorporating some protection as of Feb 6. Seems impossible to believe. But it also seems hard to believe it's something recent from MS, since I haven't had an MS update installed for three weeks!

Perhaps something "latent", tied to Win7 EOL, but that suddenly appeared on Feb 6?? Does that really make sense?

I believe lots of smart organizations must by now be working on figuring it out. I imagine we will eventually learn what's going on.

 

[TheRealMaestro]

I have just finished helping a friend who had encountered this problem; another symptom for him was that folders displayed on the desktop would not show their contents as normal. In his case, disabling Adobe's services, viz Adobe Acrobate Update and anything which name begins 'Adobe Genuine', so three services in all, closing all applications and logging off solved the problem. I can attest that this issue is likely due to a botched Adobe update.

 

[dsperber]

According to a recent post on Microsoft Answers Community forum:

PaulSey...

• Microsoft Employee|
• Forum Owner

“We’ve identified and resolved the issue, which was related to a recent Adobe Genuine update that impacted a small number of Windows 7 users. Adobe has fully rolled back the update automatically for all impacted customers. No action is needed by customers. If you are still experiencing the issue, it will be resolved shortly via an automatic update

We shall see if this is truly the fix.

This suggests that NOTHING IS NEEDED FOR USERS TO DO (other than perhaps roll back any temporary "fixes" they might have applied, e.g. the GPEDIT change for the UAC adminstrative approval item, changing programs to "run as Administrator" to once again no longer have that setting, etc.). In other words just return to the way things looked on about Feb 5 and the backout fixes from Adobe will cure everything and you will be back to normal again.

I wasn't aware that Adobe was quietly pushing out their own software updates (e.g. to Adobe Genuine services running in the background and now accused of being responsible for this worldwide debacle) without us users knowing about it, but I guess we now know this is going on. Perhaps I shouldn't be totally surprised?? I mean at least updates to Flash Player require our acknowledging and permission to apply, and thus the ability to prevent these updates.

So, is it only Win7 users who were affected? What about Win10? Don't Adobe Geuine Services run there as well? Did it impact anything else, e.g. Macrium Reflect image backups and VSS malfunctions strangely occurring around Feb 7, but not on Feb 6?? Reports of that as well.

We shall see what settles out over the next few days.

 

[Barman58]

No issues on my Win10 with Adobe CC Photographic pack and bitdefender both installed and running daily - Adobe added the option to auto update in the the Creative Cloud application several months ago. I "signed up" to it and have had no issues with it or any related or unrelated software, to date,

The genuine service is a requirement for CC applications to run so should be running on any legit install.

It would be interesting to hear if only Win7 users are affected, and also what they have the UAC set to - Microsoft have always stated that setting this to level zero could cause some issues but in the five years that Win 7 was fully supported I would have expected that potential issue to be fixed - I can recall several UAC changes in the early days supposedly to "Fine Tune" the system

 

[dsperber]

Just to report my own experience...

Just returned the UAC administator approval handling setting back to the way it originally was (i.e. DISABLED), with GPEDIT.

Just un-checked "run as Administrator" for Clockwise.exe, to the way it originally was (i.e. un-checked).

Re-booted. (I was allowed to restart without any prompts or issues).

Startup was "normal", and Clockwise was once auto-launched and behaved normally to set the Windows clock (as it always has been doing for the past 20 years, until this past week).

I then re-booted, and was once again not bothered with any prompts or complaints.

Once again, startup was totally "normal with Clockwise still behaving properly.

Certainly looks like everything has been restored to normal.

NOTE: As of this moment my Adobe Genuine service programs currently have a date of 10/9/2019. This is the same date as much of the content of that folder.

I then looked at a Macrium Reflect system image backup from 2/10, and examined the same folder. Sure enough the dates on these files and most of the content of that folder was dated 2/3/2020, clearly when the defective updates got pushed out to the world.

Looks like this is a true story, and "the fix is now installed".

Could be case closed! Happy ending.

 

[KenK]

We have 3 machines (maybe more) affected by this in a domain environment. None have BitDefender, all have Kaspersky.

Tried upgrading one of those machine to Windows 10, which REMOVED Kaspersky and the problem still existed on that computer. I've since restored it back to Windows 7 for trouble shooting purposes.

The shut down problem was was remedied (at least temporarily) with the gpedit fix described in an earlier post on this thread. But, we're having other permissions issues like programs that no longer have access to the registry unless run as administrator, sporadic blocked access to the clipboard from VBA code and at least one script written in VB that can't connect to it's OLE server and errors with "Active X can't create object." YET, there are 10+ other scripts written with the exact same connection code that work fine. I've not been able to find anything in that one VB project that might make it different from the others and therefore blocked.

I was excited to see the Adobe part of things on this thread after having seen it elsewhere. But, shutting all the services down did not help AND my EXEs in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\AdobeGCClient folder pretty much look like the picture above on a computer that no longer has the problem (right?).

Any suggestions would be very welcome.

Thank you!
Ken

 

[dsperber]

I was excited to see the Adobe part of things on this thread after having seen it elsewhere. But, shutting all the services down did not help AND my EXEs in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\AdobeGCClient folder pretty much look like the picture above on a computer that no longer has the problem (right?).

Just to be clear, the DEFECTIVE Adobe software was dated 2/3/2020, pushed out to the world probably around 2/6 or so. Turns out THIS is what caused all of the problems with many of the world's Win7 machines.

Adobe withdrew that update about a week later (assuming you had access to the internet and re-booted your machine, so that the Adobe software update process would be triggered), reverting back to the previous version. On my machine that was from 10/9/2019... WHICH IS PROIBLEM-FREE.

I then reversed all of my temporary fixes {e.g. GPEDIT tweak) and temporary overrides (e.g. "run as administrator") and temporary overrides (e.g. no longer running a program as auto-start at boot time, but manually launching it later), and am fully back to where I was before all of this started. Everything is now working fine... with the 2/3/2020 Adobe update BACKED OUT.

 

[KenK]

Yeah, that's what I thought, hence my "any suggestions are very welcome," because we're still broken.

I'll post back if I find anything interesting.

 

[KenK]

Turns out the fix we applied (found on many a web page, including here earlier in this thread) was causing our other permissions issues.

As described to me: This fix, essentially, turns off UAC, BUT it doesn't rally turn it off, it's still active but not showing any message that UAC is doing the blocking. Or something to that effect.

Basically, we undid the above fix and everything is back to normal. Could be, as also described earlier in this thread in a quote from a Microsoft Employee, Adobe fixed the problem with an automatic update.

We made no other changes to the systems other than undoing the above fix and everything, including shutting down, is working fine.

In case the shut down thing rears it's head again, another fix to the shut down thing that worked without changing the UAC is also in the group policy:
Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignments > Double click (or right click, Properties) Shut down the system and add the necessary users to the list.

Hopefully this helps someone.

All Best and Thanks!
Ken

 

[RoWin7]

DOUBLE AHAHAHAHAH!!!

I have now opened a thread on the BitDefender Forum about this topic. We shall see what unfolds there.

....

Link is dead.

I removed Avira after their scandal and installed BD. I'm not having any permission issues. This is the first I've heard of it. Should I replace BD?

 

[Barman58]

The cause was found to be due to an Adobe Update which has been fixed with a later update, the only work needed by the user is to remove various changes that were made in an attempt to clear the issue as was noted in the post above

 

[dsperber]

Link is dead.

I removed Avira after their scandal and installed BD. I'm not having any permission issues. This is the first I've heard of it. Should I replace BD?

LInk is dead because that thread has been deleted from the BD forum. In fact it was NOT BD which was at fault (it was, indeed, the Adobe Genuine Services update).

While initially I believed from my experimental evidence that it was BD which was at fault, in reality there was a separate coincidental reason why it wrongly appeared to me that it was BD that was the culprit. As part of my preliminary research I coincidentally restored an older system image backup taken a few days before the symptom first appeared, and while in Safe Mode uninstalled BD, only then booting to normal Windows. And the symptom was gone, convincing me (naively, before it was known to truly be the Adobe update which was actually responsible for all the symptoms) that it was the uninstall of BD which was the secret sauce.

In actuality, I had restored a system image backup which had been taken prior to my receiving of the updated (and problematic) Adobe updates. So THAT was what was truly behind the symptoms disappearing, not the uninstall of BD.

And when I then reinstalled BD, AND HAD TO REBOOT TO COMPLETE, that is what provided the opportunity for the defective Adobe updates to once again get installed on my system... and hence why the symptoms returned. Again, it wasn't really because I'd now reinstalled BD. It was because the reboot gave the flawed Adobe updates the opportunity to reappear.

In the end, it was the Adobe updates proven to be responsible for all the symptoms. BD (as well as any other anti-virus/anti-malware product) was completely blameless.

And all of the early-provided well-publicized workarounds and temporary gimmicks people or sites discovered and published (including the GPEDIT method, "run as administrator", etc.) proved to be completely unnecessary to solving the problem. These were just temporary ways discovered to deal with the externalization of the symptoms, before the true underlying cause was understood.

Eventually Adobe withdrew their flawed update which was in fact the true underlying cause. And then everything else could also now be returned to pre-symptom state. All workarounds and gimmicks were no longer needed and could now be undone and removed, and the Win7 system environment restored to how things looked on your Win7 system prior to the early-February first appearance of the defective Feb 3 Adobe updates, which gave rise to all the world's symptoms.

 

[RoWin7]

Adobe PDF Reader or Flashplayer?

 

[dsperber]

Adobe PDF Reader or Flashplayer?

It was Adobe Genuine Services. I think that software probably for sure gets installed and used if you use any licensed Adobe software product. It may also get installed for ANY Adobe product period, even free ones, but I'm sure it is tied to licensed Adobe products. See my screenshots in this earlier post on this thread.

In my case I do have both free Adobe PDF Reader and free Flash Player installed, as well as licensed Adobe Photoshop CS6. The update (and rollback) of Adobe Genuine Services programs is probably handled by Adobe Updater.Startup.Utility.exe (which is located in \Common Files\Adobe and present in an entry in the Startup tab of MSCONFIG).

 

[RoWin7]

I'm safe. I use Foxit PDF Reader and I've dumped Flash.

 

[BlueGuy]

Sumatra PDF and PDF-XChange Editor Portable

 

[RoWin7]

If my computer told me I didn't have permission to boot it, I'd be very happy.

 

[Barman58]

Just don't boot it in just your socks, It'll hurt :roflmao: