The Problem
I've seen this twice now. HijackThis crashes after being open for a bit, to the tune of a nondescript error message. In Windows Vista: "HijackThis has stopped working." Sometimes you'll get a few minutes use out of it before the crash. Sometimes just a few seconds. Sometimes it won't crash at all. It's only ever a problem on a laptop (I think) and this time I encountered it on a Gateway M-2626u running 64-bit Vista.
The Details
The application error log reads like this:
Faulting application HijackThis.exe, version 2.0.0.2, time stamp 0x466838c1, faulting module MSVBVM60.DLL, version 6.0.98.2, time stamp 0x4791a724, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0005d26c, process id 0x114, application start time 0x01ca43853341371a.
At first I figured there was a virus on the machine crashing HJT on a timer event. Wrong. I figured msvbvm60.dll had been corrupted and so I tried replacing it. No change. I finally noted that the application seemed to crash when I was dragging the scroll-bar or maybe resizing the window. With this in mind, I thought the video drivers were somehow the problem; 64-bit hardware drivers are always suspect. But again, no.
The Solution
In the end the culprit lie in the touchpad, or rather Synaptic's touchpad drivers. HijackThis crashes, for whatever reason, when you trigger a mouse-scroll event using the right or bottom edges of the touchpad. It's very difficult to come to this conclusion unless you are intentionally trying to scroll this way. I wasn't, but I must have been catching the edges of the pad as I used the mouse and triggering a scroll; that made it very hard for me to see what was causing the application to suddenly die at such odd intervals of use.
The file that enables the scroll functions in question is the "Synaptics Pointing Device Driver" at "Program Files\Synaptics\SynTP\SynTPEnh.exe"
Disabling it in the startup routine via 'msconfig' will prevent HJT from crashing, though it will also disable the scroll functions of your touchpad; something most people never use and that only gets in the way, anyway. (Much as it did here.) I say turn the thing off.
Did a Google search for this problem and this was the first page I found. This is the first time ever I've searched for a strange problem and found a solution first thing and, being a computer tech, I do these searches just about every day. Glad you came up first. Problem solved. By the way, Malwarebytes can also close unexpectedly because of this.
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