Solved Getting "Preparing Security Options"

[LevelBest]

This is what has led to this situation - running a previous and successful system image that was created just one week after getting the laptop. There are many posts on many forums describing getting PSO AFTER a clean install of windows. Even some people getting the problem on brand new computers. I've never felt that the system image is the problem having successfully used it before and it was from a set of DVDs so it's not as if the image was on an external harddrive which could be open to viruses or becoming faulty. When I'm not having the problem of PSO, the computer behaves perfectly.

 

[LevelBest]

Hi Roy

Is there anything suspicious looking in the programmes?

Is the Disc Management Structure as it should be?

LevelBest

 

[LevelBest]

I'm updating this thread for other people who are having this problem.

Over the last three weeks I’ve continued to work on solving this problem and am pretty confident I’ve got it sorted.

Given that one of the potential reported issues that can trigger “preparing security options” is the hard drive I downloaded Seatools and initially ran a short drive self test (20 seconds) and a short generic test, both of which the hard drive passed. I then ran a 2½ hour ‘long generic test’ which reads each sector on the hard drive. It passed, so I was confident that the fault wasn’t related to the hard drive. I was also pretty confident this was not a virus having run probably half a dozen different virus scans including a BitDefender rescue disc which runs a virus check outside of the windows system.

From the start of this issue, I held onto two facts; (1) that the system image I’d run was successful, given that I’d used the computer for a couple of days to see if all was OK before I started downloading windows updates and re-building the computer, and (2) the problem started after I installed all the updates (which was an overnight job).

I started to observe what programmes were being used when PSO occurred and began to notice a pattern whereby opening IE11 seemed to trigger it although it could still happen if I was using Chrome or other apps/programmes. Also I thought that LiveMail was possibly the culprit as it would pretty much always happen when I opened that but then I realised it wasn’t LiveMail itself but when accessing a link (via IE11) in an email.

I re-set IE11 and also ran MS Fixit and IE seemed to run better but PSO was still occurring, so I decided to uninstall IE11completely. I was surprised to find it not listed in programmes but it had arrived care of a Windows KB update and that was a bit of a ‘light bulb’ moment as that fitted with my feeling that this whole issue was related to a faulty update. I rolled the computer back to IE8 and then re-installed IE11. It’s been 8 days and probably 16 separate logons and all is well.

The main problem with this issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a ‘one size fits all’ cause or fix. I know from pretty much reading all the posts there are on the net about this, that a faulty IE as the cause, has not been mentioned so I’m putting this out there now.

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