A few days ago I bought direct from Sony a 512Mb USB MicroVault stick. When I first put it into my USB port it claimed that it could compress data on the fly to make the capacity much greater, and asked me if I wanted to install the on-the-fly compressor/decompressor as part of the startup. Suspecting nothing, I agreed.
The next time I started Windows I got a Windows "Data Execution Prevention" warning saying that Windows Explorer had caused a DEP problem and would be closed. I acknowledged that, and the system seemed to work fine.
Until I went to start Second Life. Then I got the error above. For those whose monitors can't make out the dialogue box, it says "Second Life cannot be run from this machine. If you believe this to be an error, please contact support@secondlife.com"
The first thing I thought was that I'd been banned. So I went to the second life account page, and it said everything was in order. Next billing date, end of February, account status active. So I tried it on my laptop - and got in without a problem.
Reasoning that the DEP was the only thing to have changed in my configuration, I opened the startup group and deleted the Sony compression utility. Then I rebooted, and hey presto - no DEP. I tried Second Life again, and it worked fine.
So, to anyone who has recently bought, or may plan to buy, a Sony USB Microvault storage stick - take heed. You'll need to STOP the decompressor working at startup or you might find programs working unpredictably.
In a final footnote, before I took action myself, I did write to Second Life support to ask about this, and got an email back this morning saying they'd reviewed the situation and found that after I'd emailed them I had apparently connected without any problems (which is quite true) - so, an easy close ticket there. Can't help wondering if they'd have been so quick replying if I hadn't solved the problem!
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