By their very nature, anti-virus and registry cleaner software may interfere with the normal operation of legitimately installed applications. This article outlines some of the issues this causes with Macrium Reflect and provides some solutions.

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 ReflectBin.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.

Turning the security level to a lower setting or off completely may also have the desired effect. In testing we have found that with some products, the only way to proceed has been to remove the anti-virus software from the PC entirely. 
It is perhaps an ironic paradox that in their pursuit of "total security" some anti-virus programs have started to exhibit virus-like behavior by stopping applications performing legitimate actions and compromising your PC by corrupting the data they seek to protect and reducing its performance.

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 redundant 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.