Glasswire is down again. Just disconnects with no reason and then can’t reconnect. Its been two days now but I expect this will last for another week at minimum, like all the other times. I don’t know what is up, but mine only works like 60% of the time.
Do you mean the GlassWire app itself, i.e. the cloud-based services that it can use? Or other apps are blocked because of GlassWire?
I use the GlassWire app in offline mode. I don’t see any real benefit in the online features.
The GlassWire program itself. I don’t know about offline/online mode… I just open the program on my computer to run as I paid it to do, and the entire program is blanked out because it isn’t able to connect. For the past couple weeks it has been working perfectly fine, but two days ago I noticed the tray icon was gray, so I double-clicked on it to look at it and it wasn’t able to connect.
Hi,
You might be best to uninstall, reboot, and then clean install using the reset windows firewall etc in the installer options.
After that another reboot.
I’ve done that so many times. Never has any effect. Even Glasswire can’t seem to figure out what the problem is. I’ve sent them so many logs… absolutely tired of it. The program randomly works after some time has passed, which tells me that it has something to do with the actual Glasswire service itself. Like their service fails and it takes them a few days to fix it and then it starts working again, then it fails again and they fix it a week later. Just like with the network scanner issue… just stopped working one day, a month later it worked again. I don’t know what the issue is, but I’m not uninstalling/reinstalling this thing any more. I paid for an entire year of service and it hasn’t worked a solid 3 months out of that year. And its not working now and I have another 4 months of service. So we will see when it starts working again, or I just have to accept that I paid for it and got hoodwinked.
Does it look something like this?
I recreated this by manually stopping the GlassWire Control Service. If that is what you are getting then something on your system is causing the background service to crash. There are quite a few topics about this in this forum which might help; e.g.
But I would certainly get back onto support, if you are paying they should fix this for you.
That problem doesnt necessarily mean that something on MY system is causing it to crash. I have had Glasswire for a very long time and when the service all of a sudden stops running one day and Glasswire cannot figure out what the problem is, and then randomly one day it starts again, then 3 days later stops, then a week later works again… its not something on my system. Like I said, I have sent dump files to Glasswire many times and they cannot seem to find out what the problem is and eventually stop responding to requests… that mimics the same issues and responses that others have had.
This morning I woke up to Glasswire being closed again. So I opened it and this error message was at the top of the screen. I can confirm that I indeed have the latest version of Glasswire. It looks like Glasswire blocked itself either right before it crashed or when I reopened it. Once I allowed gwcrashpadhandler.exe the error message across the top disappeared. Roughly 30 minutes later Glasswire disappeared from my taskbar again.
This is just one of many of the random issues that keep occurring.
I’ve used GlassWire daily for almost 7 years and have never experienced a service crash. But you and few others have. So it must be something about these systems that causes the GlassWire service to crash. If it wasn’t system specific, everyone would experience the issue which is not the case. It will probably be an exception which GlassWire is not catching and handling correctly (which is what gwcrashpadhandler is supposed to do).
In the Services utility it is possible to set recovery options which will automatically restart the local service. This may help if it is an intermittent short term fault. However, this won’t help if it repeatedly fails in quick succession.
Windows Event Log is your other troubleshooting tool. It will likely log the fault, but finding the root cause is probably not going to be simple. If another process fails immediately before then that may offer some clues.
But really GlassWire should be providing the support you need. You have after all paid for a service you are not receiving.
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Have to agree, I have been running GW for many years as well, and while I have many complaints or features I would like to see them resolve/implement, constant crashing is not one of them, and I run this software across 10 different PC builds with different software installed on each.
This will be a local system problem, registry corruption, file corruption, dll conflicts, other software conflicts. Personally I hate the reinstall Windows approach to fix things, as I have the skills to use tools like sysinternals and software debuggers to trace what is going on in my machines and find these kinds of issues, but many people don’t and this may be your only option if you have tried doing various system cleaning, Windows image repairs, etc., and they haven’t resolved your problem with Glasswire.
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I looked on the Glasswire forum and there are many many people with the same complaints I have. Looks to have began around Nov 2023 and has been a constant issue since. This bit of “reinstall windows” to fix a 3rd party program is absolutely absurd, especially given I didn’t make any changes to my system before it happened, and the fact that Glasswire support isn’t helping anyone with this issue… they haven’t even responded “reinstall Windows”. Instead, they have asked for dump files and then eventually say “we don’t know what the problem is”. If I was the only person experiencing this issue then yeah, I would accept that its all my system’s fault. But since many other people with different systems and scenarios and circumstances are experiencing the same problem, I highly doubt its all on us. It seems that the only fix that has worked for a few people is reinstalling Glasswire, but I have done so multiple times and things work fine for a random amount of time, and then the program begins crashing again. Reinstalling Windows to fix Glasswire isn’t really a solution for me, especially given that Windows Firewall still continues to work on its own.
If I was given a reason why Windows needs to be reinstalled, such as “this specific .dll is corrupted because of Windows”, or “Glasswire is conflicting with this specific program”, then I’d be willing to entertain the idea. But I’m not going to reinstall Windows to hopefully fix an issue that Glasswire doesn’t even understand.
Here is a forum post where the service kept crashing. Glasswire admitted it was their problem and needed to patch up the program to fix it. So I don’t know how you two have never had a problem with Glasswire when so many people had the same problem and Glasswire had to patch up the program to fix the problems. Is it possible that yall are just using old versions of the program and never experienced the problems present with the new versions? And if so, are yall’s systems not at-risk using old versions that haven’t been updated to respond to new threats?
Here is another forum post with similar issues:
I update soon after a new version is released. I am running the latest now. Updates to GlassWire don’t respond threats. GlassWire is simply a network monitoring utility which also provides a management interface for the the built-in Windows Firewall. It is not the sort of security product which actively monitors for threats or malicious behaviour patterns using updated definitions. It simply shows you what is running on your system, gives you some tools to check what it is doing, and then block or allow network access.
So there is no actual need to update the software if it is running without any problems? Maybe that is the problem itself… it seems like most complaints have to do with the program AFTER major update(s) near Nov 2023 and Nov 2024. I know my first issue came about after updating the program. So if there are no security issues with using an out-dated version, it seems like it would be best for people to just use the old versions and not run into these problems. Its awesome that you never have any problems with the new versions, but the hundreds of other users experiencing these problems would be best to use an older version that works fine on their systems, especially given that Glasswire isn’t providing support.
With new versions you do get new features and quality of life improvements. Like the ability to easily delete firewall entries for old uninstalled software. I am not going to say there are absolutely no security issues using an older version. GlassWire may have patched a security issue they haven’t disclosed. But there are not the same concerns as running an old virus scanner.
If you can identify the point that you started to have problems then it might be worth trying a version from before then.
You must have missed the part where I stated “Personally I hate the reinstall Windows approach to fix things”. It would be a matter of last resort for those who don’t have the skills to pursue other avenues. Don’t blame me for the fact that millions of people around the world experience software crashes on their Windows PC’s with any of them being the result of crap software and buggy code to hardware faults and failures, to any number of problems in between. If software and hardware was all so perfect no one would ever have a problem.
The point is the software is working for a large part of the install base and it is those that have issues that quite understandably shout the loudest when they can’t get the software to work. You don’t have all the people that it does work for on forums complaining about how well their software works.
So I empathise that in your case the software on your machine is not working as intended. I have no ability to diagnose the specifics of what is running on your PC and what may be leading to the fault, and thus a specific reason to reinstall windows (only one of many options you can take). As I said I would prefer you don’t and can troubleshoot the issue to resolve without reinstalling which is a PITA for so many reasons. Also any insights you gain if you resolve it without reinstall will benefit the broader community especially those also facing the problem.
You are always free to create a VM using any of the free hypervisors available and install the software on a clean install of Windows inside a VM along with your Glasswire app and see if it misbehaves and you can reproduce the result in the absence of any other software conflicting. Then if you have the same issue, you probably have a good case that it is a Glasswire software bug (doesn’t rule out a Microsoft one either), from which you could get them to diagnose.
It is most likely though that if it resurfaces in a clean VM that virtually every Glasswire user would have the problem, which would point back to a specific issue on your machine for your particular case.
Other users may have different issues that are causing the problem, but there could be a common thread for example many software bundles use common shared dll libraries that might be causing the problem (e.g. C++ redistributables), so for users that install software that uses these and that is the cause of the problem then they are likely all going to be affected, even though the specific applications being used may be different.
As you can imagine, there is virtually an infinite amount of combinations that could result in this. Welcome to the world of software developers that have to try and resolve such issues.
I do wonder why the version you are running seems to be so old in comparison to the current version. You stated version 2.3.321 and 2.3.318. The current version I am running on Windows 10 and 11 PC’s is 3.5.821, so there has been significant changes to the software to address bugs and features since when your versions were released back in mid 2021. Also Windows 10 20H2 was released in October 2020 and there has been three major updates since then along with the myriad of patch Tuesday updates that come out along the way. And not suggesting that you now have to go and update your PC to the latest version either, that is entirely your call on what patching regime you want to run and maintain, but you have a lot to contend with here so I can only wish you good luck.
Who are you even talking to at this point? It sounds like you are taking a complaint directed at Glasswire PERSONAL, as if people are personally talking to you and coming to you for help. Nobody has blamed you for anything and if you don’t have any ability to diagnose something then simply don’t participate in the conversation. Or you really could just share all the assistance that you offered without allowing your ego to get in the way here, as people are just looking for help from others since they can’t get it from Glasswire… they are not looking for hostile interactions with random people. Since I started the thread I assume you are talking to me, but then you mentioned that someone stated two different versions, and I have not done that and I don’t see anyone else that has done that… it seems like you don’t realize that someone shared a link to a forum post from awhile ago.