SuperNova and Dolphin ScreenReader
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      Real-time behaviour monitoring features of anti-virus software causes poor SuperNova performance or crashes

      Configuring real-time threat prevention modules of third-party security software

      If you work in a corporate environment and experience issues such as:

      • Certain applications won’t even launch while SuperNova is running.
      • Your screen goes completely black as soon as SuperNova is launched.
      • Your Windows desktop and/or Windows Explorer crashes as soon as SuperNova is launched.
      • Your PC becomes extremely laggy as soon as SuperNova is launched.
      • SuperNova starts up with a "Magnification Engine failed to start. Code 5701740" error message.
      • Windows applications crash on startup (referencing either dol_hook.dll or dolwinhk.dll).
      • SuperNova regularly hangs for protracted periods of time.
      • You receive a message, such as the one displayed below, from your security software, as soon as SuperNova is launched.

      panda

      Then you may want to check your PC for any real-time behaviour monitoring / active threat prevention / anti-ransomware security software that may be running on it, such as:

      • Morphisec for Windows Endpoints 
      • BitDefender
      • Bromium Endpoint Protection
      • FireEye Endpoint Security
      • Ivanti AppSense
      • Ivanti Endpoint Management
      • Cisco Advanced Malware Protection for Endpoints
      • Panda Adaptive Defense 360
      • Bullguard Premium Protection

      If you do have real-time behaviour monitoring software running on your PC and are suffering from the problems listed above, then please ask your I.T. Department to try configuring any real-time behaviour monitoring software on your PC to “trust” SuperNova.

      i.e. Some security software has advanced threat protection features that monitor what each and every process on your computer is doing in real-time. They do this by injecting monitoring code into all other running processes on the system, including SuperNova, to monitor them for suspicious and/or malicious behaviour and potentially intercept and block that process.

      Because assistive technology that works in conjunction with other applications, to read the screen aloud and magnify it clearly, by necessity needs to hook into those other applications to see what’s going on, sometimes the heuristic real-time monitoring of security software can block some of the things that an assistive technology tool needs to do unexpectedly and on rare occasions can even cause it to crash.

      So just to rule out your security software’s real-time behaviour monitoring feature being the root cause of the above problems, please ask your I.T. Department to disable any real-time behaviour monitoring of the SuperNova process (i.e. Snova.exe / Lunpls.exe / Lunar.exe / Hal.exe, depending on your edition of SuperNova, located in a sub-folder of C:\Program Files (x86)\Dolphin\) and then reboot your PC for those changes to take effect.

      It seems that these real-time behaviour monitoring modules hook a bunch of operating system API calls, typically they’re hooking CoCreateInstance and then various COM interfaces which means that every accessibility API call SuperNova makes goes through their extra layer of security. They’re also known to block certain API calls they consider insecure, which could result in SuperNova either failing completely, falling back to sub-optimal code, or getting unexpected timeouts on calls. The added overhead of their code also can have a nasty effect on SuperNova’s performance.

      Further information on how to configure some of the most popular security software to “trust” SuperNova (aka creating an “exception”):

      Please note: The above issues won't be caused by the usual anti-virus hard disk scan or memory scan, where it typically scans the file contents or the process's memory contents for a sequence of instructions of a known virus or known malware type. They're caused by the type of behaviour monitoring feature that heuristically monitors an application's API calls in real-time that can sometimes cause the above listed issues for SuperNova if SuperNova is not excluded from this type of real-time behaviour monitoring.