This is nothing new but wanted to ask. Several times when I sign on the PC my MSE is turned off, the little icon is orange. I run a quick scan every night before shutting it down. The other night I ran a full scan and had to remove an item listed as severe. Removed it and shut down the PC. The next day after being on the PC for a few minutes I realized the icon was orange and had to run a quick scan to turn it on again. What's up with this?

Terri, are you running Security Essentials on your new Windows 8 computer? If so, did you disable the Windows Defender first? If you tried to install Security Essentials, hopefully it prompted you that you can't run it unless you disable Defender first. You can't run both of them at the same time.

When you open it up, does it say it's been turned off?

Hi Drac. The problem is on my old pc, the HP/os Vista.

OK... Have you tried running Malwarebytes to see if it finds something? The only thing I'm aware of that would cause your MSE to be turned off is malware of some kind.

Also check Windows Update to see if there's a new version of Security Essentials available. It will probably be listed under "Optional" downloads.

I needed to update MSE, did so and it is a new version. I ran a full scan and it came up with a big -0-, no malware.

Yay!

Glad it worked. I had the same problem on my Windows XP computer.

This morning when I turned the PC on the MSE was disabled and the little icon was orange again. ( message said You haven't run a scan on you computer for a while) Even though the scan was fine apparently something is not right. Any thoughts on this?

Does this apply?

You receive error: "You haven't run a scan on your computer for a while.

The box by MSE antimalware is not ticked.

Sometimes when you start the computer, MSE tries to download an update before your Windows drivers are loaded -- and that will make it turn orange because it can't access the Internet.

When my computer had this problem with MSE turning orange, the problem seemed to be either that it couldn't download the daily update or that it hadn't at least run the "quick" scan recently. Every time I turned the computer on, MSE would want something. Sometimes I had to get the definitions update through Windows Update before MSE would be satisfied that it had the latest definitions update. After a month or two the problem disappeared as quickly and inexplicably as it had started.

I don't know why it did that. It wasn't very important -- just annoying. And eventually it went away on its own.

Hi Jenny. This all makes sense but because I do update and run the scan daily do you think that's the problem? I don't recall MSE ever asking for anything. This has been going on for months and I am going to guess that all is ok and that I have no problems.
Thanks everyone.
Terri

Oh gee, I can't preview my posts again.

Do you have MSE set to automatically do a daily scan? I have it set for weekly, though I may run scans manually between times.

When the little icon in the taskbar turns red or orange, that means it wants attention. Red means it's not running, which usually means it's out of date and you have to go to Windows Update and get the new one. Orange usually means it thinks it needs to update its virus definition or it thinks it's time for a scan. If the computer is not on at the time it was scheduled to do its scan, it may turn orange because it missed its scan.

If your preview stopped working, it may just mean you have to refresh the webpage.

Oh Jenny. Something always needs attention! lol I don't believe I have ever seen the little icon turn red, I'm only familiar with green and orange. I will check what my setting is for the MSE updates. I thought it was just set to update.
Thanks ever so much for your help.
Terri