** Lenovo Active Protection System V1.0.0.21 Causing Windows 7 64-bit to randomly lock up **

Question

Hi everyone,
We supplied 4 x Lenovo ThinkCentre M93P Tiny Desktops (Model: 10AB003SAU) to a business customer earlier in the year.
They are all running Windows 7 64-bit with 500GB 7000RPM SATA drives.
Late last week to early this week (approx 17 April 2015 to 20 April 2015) an update came through Lenovo System Update for Lenovo Active System Protection V1.0.0.21 which the customer installed on all four of their systems.
Since then, all four systems have been hanging & locking up during use & then require a hard reset for the systems to be usable again until the problem reoccurs next time then the same thing over & over.
I spent a heap of time going over the systems trying to work out the cause of this issue which has cost me an absolute fortune in lost productivity & lost revenue.
It also lost the customer a lot of time & renenue due to the systems being problematic over a number of days.
Thanks very much Lenovo! Won't get any of that time or lost labour back!
Customer is furious with both us & Lenovo over this matter, we will likely lose future business due to this.
Hoping this may save someone else a major headache if they see this post early enough as I assume problem would be relatively widespread if people are using Lenovo Update.
If anyone else has or had this issue recently then please comment.
Very disappointed with this problem due to an update which appears to be not fully tested!
I wonder how likely it will be that we will continue to supply Lenovo systems to other customers after this in the future......

Answer 1

Thanks very much for keeping this issue alive.
Let me restate the issue:
We have a AIR 2.0.4.13090 sidecar application. Installing the application for the very first time seems to work. Any uninstall or update after that runs into issues on the problematic Windows 7 64 bit machine. The installer logs all point the finger to Windows Installer having problems writing to the temp directory.
We've gone through many, many things trying to resolve this, including resetting administrative access to the temp directory and flushing the temp directory out entirely. I'm reporting this news secondhand, so it's not possible for me to directly relate the exact measures taken, step-by-step. The ONLY thing that reliably worked for running and installing updates on this AIR application was the following:
1) Create a new administrative level user.
2) Log in with that user.
3) Disable firewalls.
4) Run the updater.
5) Log back in as normal user, delete temporary user.
if the user account created in step 1 is not deleted in step 5 and is used to attempt a further update or uninstall, it will fail. This seems to tell me that AIR is able to utilize the temp folder via Windows Installer correctly only once. After that, it dirties this directory somehow and is unable to use/write to it, and subsequent uninstalls/updates fail with error 0.
Again, the failure all show msi issues writing to the temp directory. They result in an "Error 0" alert dialog in AIR.