Anti-virus software
Problems
Imaging
When imaging your disk, Macrium Reflect performs a number of actions that some anti-virus software may think of as being malicious. For example, when imaging or cloning your disk Macrium Reflect reads certain parts of the disk that are not generally accessed by every day applications. Reflect also writes very large files (the image file) which again is sometimes seen as being malicious by some anti-virus software. Specifically, it is often the case that imaging a drive will lock up or abort when 99% complete.
Performance
Anti-virus software is also sometimes responsible for significant degradation in the speed of imaging and restoration since the anti-virus process is constantly applying its rules to everything that Macrium Reflect and the other processes running on your PC are doing.
Downloading
When downloading a file onto your PC, before it has been written to your disk prior to execution, anti-virus software may exclusively lock file and scan it for viruses. Unfortunately, this may result in corruption of the download.
Solution
You should add the Macrium Reflect executable to the white list or trusted zone of your anti-virus software. The executable that runs Macrium Reflect is Reflect.exe and is generally located in C:\Program Files\Macrium\Reflect. We also recommend that you should exclude the scanning of .MRIMG and .MRBAK files.
Registry Cleaners
Overview
The registry is a key component of Microsoft Windows and provides an indexed store of values. Any application running on Windows may use the registry although there are certain guidelines on it's correct use. Although most application vendors conform to these guidelines, there is a perceived belief that a large registry contributes to the slow running of a PC. To tackle this problem, there are products that claim to make your computer faster by cleaning the registry and removing data no longer in use. There is no way of determining if a value stored in the registry is in use so the cleaners make a best-guess based on studying commonly used Windows applications and how they affect the registry.
Problems
Since Macrium Reflect uses the registry, cleaners that are unaware of Macrium Reflect may see the keys it uses as reduntant and remove them accordingly. The result of doing so can cause unpredictable behaviour by Macrium Reflect, such as your key appearing to become expired and being unable to mount images.
Solution
We do not recommend the use of Registry Cleaners. The Windows registry is exceedingly complex and used by every aspect of your PC.
Uninstallers
We have had a number of issues where users have been unable to uninstall Macrium Reflect. This may be caused by software that deletes the files on your PC that Macrium uses to safely uninstall itself. If these files are removed, it no longer becomes possible to uninstall Reflect. Generally these files reside in folder 'c:\windows\installer' with extension '.msi'. Deleting any files from this folder should be avoided as this will likely cause future problems when upgrading or uninstalling.
Solution
We do not recommend the use of uninstaller programs. Windows provides an entirely adequate framework for installing and uninstalling software and problems in this area are inevitably caused by the applications being installed, not by Windows. If you have issues uninstalling Macrium Reflect please contact support.