Lenovo customer support on the way down?

I had a less than stellar experience back in 2006 with Lenovo customer support. Lenovo is the company that purchased the IBM PC business, but in reality, they had been building the well-regarded ThinkPad line of laptops for IBM for some time. When they were IBM, I had only two or three occassions to call IBM support, and each experience was satisfying – no knock down, drag out fight to get support. Simple answers and resolutions.

This time, however, proved to be less than exceptional. I submitted my gripe via the Lenovo support web site. The problem was a file on a ThinkPad X60, IPSSVC.EXE was being flagged by Symantec Antivirus as a “threat”, and was causing Symantec Antivirus to create huge log files. Over a period of less than a month, over 9GB of log files had been created! So, of course, you are saying to yourself, sounds like a Symantec problem. I also contacted Symantec support, and I was given some options (basically, configure Threat protection to ignore processes and internal objects – not an optimal solution, but it was a start). So, I submitted my complaint to Lenovo, asking them what IPSSVC.EXE was and how I could safely remove it from the system. I got a voice mail a few hours after I submitted that, with a case number and a phone number to call to follow up, along with the warning that if I didn’t call, they would consider the case to be closed. Closed? You haven’t done anything yet!

I should mention that the first thing I did once I looked at one of the log files and identified IPSSVC.EXE as the culprit was to do a Google search on that process, and found a few pages refering to it being a Lenovo file that might be used for VPN purposes. Ok, not a lot of help there, since we use a different VPN client completely unrelated to Lenovo.

I called Lenovo the next morning with my case number, and explained to the apparently young man what I had found – that IPSSVC.EXE was getting flagged by SAV about 11 times per second as a security threat, and the logs were becoming huge. I explained that I looked at the properties for IPSSVC.EXE across the network, and it was definitely a Lenovo file. Well, the guy did what I had already done – a Google search, and came up with the same information I did, but then stated that it must be a trojan or a virus, because that file is NOT a Lenovo file. I tried explaining three times that the System Properties were showing it as a Lenovo file, but he kept insisting that it wasn’t.

The phone call went downhill from there – me insisting it was a Lenovo problem, and the guy on the phone insisting the file wasn’t their responsibility. So I told the guy that this was an unsatisfactory customer support experience, and that I was terminating the call.

It took me a while to make the connection, but eventually I looked at the Product Name entry, and found that it was related to an item called “Away Manager“. Ah, now we are getting somewhere. So, I ended up visiting the system and doing two things:

1. Reconfigured Symantec Antivirus to ignore Processes and Internal Objects for Threat Protection.

2. Uninstalled the Away Manager tool, part of the ThinkPad “tools” that the system is chock full of.

I am still not really happy about how this turned out. For one thing, the fact that the guy wouldn’t listen to what I was trying to tell him, that he had already made up his mind that the problem was not a Lenovo issue, I found aggravating. And after I hung up, I realized that as often as I may be on the other end of the phone, I didn’t think to pull the “let me talk to your supervisor” card. Although, I suspect that even if I had asked, I wasn’t going to get to talk to a supervisor anyway.

So, thumbs down to the “new” Lenovo.

11/22/2006 UPDATE: I just thought I would paste in what the Lenovo web site says about the Away Manager (while I scratch my head wondering how other people got VPN out of this software…)

Away Manager
The Away Manager application allows you preselect and run routine tasks to maintain your system’s performance:

• NEW! Improved scheduling so you can set Away Manager to run when it is convenient for you, or start it immediately:
  • Maintenance tasks run based on the user-defined order
  • The user can lock the tasks
• NEW! Away Manager settings can be restricted so only the Windows Administrator can change the configuration
• Allows users or corporate IT to schedule tedious maintenance tasks to be completed at the user’s convenience
• Can be customized to run your preferred brand of anti-virus or other utilities
• Autonomic “Whisper Mode” technology forces system maintenance tasks to run quietly in the background, minimizing the impact on your other applications so you can get your work done

Still, none of this explains just what IPSSVC.EXE was doing that made Symantec Antivirus go bonkers with the log entries.

Since that time over two years ago, Lenovo changed the name of the Away Manager to the Maintenance Manager.  So I guess the key to your IPSSVC.EXE and Symantec Antivirus problems is to upgrade to version 3.0.5.0 of the Maintenance Manager:

Version 3.0.5.0 (Important)

• If the tamper protection feature of Symantec AntiVirus is enabled, Symantec Tamper Protection Alert is displayed with “IPSSVC.EXE (PID xxx)” information.

Or upgrade Symantec Antivirus to at least version 10.1.6:

• High CPU usage on IBM laptops with IBM’s Away Manager

For what it is worth, the laptops we have received over the last 5 or 6 months have no longer included the Maintenance Manager in the factory build.  And judging by the release date on the web page for the Maintenance Manager, it looks like this might be gone for good.

One other footnote (1/18/2009): This post was on a previous blog of mine, but because of family reasons, that blog needed to be blown out of Google indexing.  This was something I had intended on doing for a while, anyway – moving the tech related posts from there to here, and killing the Google indexing of the original site.

So here we are.