Microsoft Security Essentials Not Monitoring Your Computer

Microsoft Security Essentials is an antivirus and Anti-malware programme developped by Microsoft to help keep your computer safe from attacks and damages from virus and malware. It is a free programme. It is helpful and effective in some aspects but is also vulnerable sometimes. If you have seen an error as below:

Microsoft Security Essentials is not monitoring your computer because a problem occured.

It usually means that either the Antivirus and Antispyware engine has crashed and is not scanning the computer, or that another component of Microsoft Security Essentials is not working.

To solve this issue,

The first thing to check is your computer’s date and time. Check the clock in the bottom right hand corner of your desktop and make sure the Time/Day/Month/Year are set correctly.

Next, try a Clean Boot to see if you encounter the same issue. You can follow the steps here to start Windows in a Clean Boot, just ensure that “Microsoft Security Essentials” is the only thing enabled on the startup tab in MSCONFIG before you reboot: <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310353>

If that doesn’t fix the issue, we can manually check the Antimalware service to see if it’s started.

Click Start
Click Run button and type Services.msc.
Find Microsoft Antimalware (MsMpSvc) service and make sure it is started. If it shows as “Stopped” you can right click the service and try to start it. Make sure you write down any error messages that might appear.

Lastly, run a registry scan and clean the errors in your computer. Some virus or malwares may corrupt the registry and make the Microsoft Security Essentials stop working. The best way to solve the issue is to download and install a registry cleaner and let is repair your registry. After that, reinstall your security essentials and get it started again.