Windows booting issue with Hero Lab

[Sinanju]

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this problem:

I bought Hero Labs and the Mutants & Masterminds core data set. I installed on my Dell laptop (running XP). It installed correctly (as far as I can tell). It runs okay. I created a character, and even exported it to a PDF file. All of that works fine.

Problem is that ever since I installed the program, my computer has been having trouble booting. It gives a black screen full of text telling me there's a problem and warning me to fix the problem or uninstall the troublesome new software, if any. If I try to continue, I get a blue screen of death. If I shut down and try rebooting, usually it will handle whatever issue is occurring and eventually boot and run okay (again, as far as I can tell). I was not having this problem prior to loading Hero Lab.

Tonight I uninstalled Hero Lab. Then I shut down and rebooted several times--and the laptop booted without a hitch every time.

So...anyone else run into this? Anyone know how to fix it? I'd like to use the program, but not if it's going to continue causing trouble with the OS.

[Colen]

I don't see how Hero Lab could be causing this problem - we don't do anything "wacky" that might possibly cause problems when booting.

Does the problem persist when you install the latest version of Hero Lab, v3.1?

What is the exact error message you get when the computer crashes?

[rob]

I can guarantee you that we don't do anything inside Hero Lab that could be causing Windows to blue screen. We do nothing that requires privileged access internally. My best guess is that there is some weird security software installed on the computer that doesn't like Hero Lab for some reason and that's what's causing the crash. Security software always operates within privileged mode that can result in Windows crashing. And there have definitely been problems over the years with security software not liking our products (and sometimes even crashing).

Try temporarily turning off all your security software and see if the problem persists. If not, then make sure you've got the latest updates all the security software.

[Sinanju]

Okay, thanks. I'll try toying with the security software and see if that fixes the problem.