Hank Cranmore runs MOBITECH4U.com, a computer consulting business in Jacksonville, Florida. In a recent post to a tech support mailing list I’m on, he was musing about the possibility of Session 2 and newer users possibly being vulnerable to viruses or spyware.

First, some background. Every user in Windows who logs on gets logged into a session. Before Vista, the first person to logon would be in Session 0 - along with machine processes. This might not

…be good for security and means machine processes must be duplicated for each log on redundantly using extra resources.

In Vista, Session 0 is reserved for machine processes and the following sessions are for users logging on. This is better for security and reduces overhead if more than one user is logged onto the computer thus increasing performance when that happens.

But what if a program is written expecting to load into Session 0?

…then it will fail. Some security and other programs are coded that way for one reason or another. This I believe explains the current problems with some XP programs that do not work well in fast user switching. Those certainly will not like Vista.

Hmmmmm … makes me wonder how many PC’s running Fast User switching may have had security programs crippled starting with the second person to logon? Only the first person may have been protected by the anti-virus and anti-spyware software? That could explain a few things?

I’ll add that this might be a problem for Session 1 users also if the application is written this way. Does anyone have more than speculation about this?

Tags: windows vista, session 0, session 1, session 2, virus, spyware