Hardening acting (temporarily) weird after a host crash

Post by **socratis** » 22. Jun 2018, 13:26

I had a weird encounter with a hardening error, and I'm simply sharing my experience...

Host: Win7-64, SP1, latest updates, no 3rd party AV, no hardening errors. Never so far. New motherboard/CPU^[1] was "transplanted", since the old one died a couple of weeks ago. RAM, GPU, HDs were left untouched.
VirtualBox: 5.2.12 r122591
Guest: Win7-64, SP1 (at the moment of the crash), any.

The host froze. I had to shut it down from the power button. After it came back up again, VirtualBox refused to start with a hardening error! I'm almost certain that it was due to "crypt32.dll". See the last 6 lines of the "VBoxHardening.log", I could upload the whole thing if needed:

7a8.460: supR3HardenedMonitor_LdrLoadDll: rejecting 'C:\Windows\system32\crypt32.dll' (C:\Windows\system32\crypt32.dll): rcNt=0xc0000190
7a8.460: supR3HardenedMonitor_LdrLoadDll: returns rcNt=0xc0000190 'C:\Windows\system32\crypt32.dll'
7a8.460: Fatal error:
7a8.460: Error loading 'crypt32.dll': 1790 [C:\Windows\system32\crypt32.dll]
9ec.b34: supR3HardNtChildWaitFor[2]: Quitting: ExitCode=0x1 (rcNtWait=0x0, rcNt1=0x0, rcNt2=0x103, rcNt3=0x103, 1412 ms, the end);
7b8.8ac: supR3HardNtChildWaitFor[1]: Quitting: ExitCode=0x1 (rcNtWait=0x0, rcNt1=0x0, rcNt2=0x103, rcNt3=0x103, 2062 ms, the end);

Now, and that's the weird part, I rebooted the host. I run a check on the HDs. And guess what? It worked! Nothing to report from 'chkdsk'. I'm just putting my experience here as a reference for when something (seemingly out of the blue) goes wrong, with no clear explanation. And then again out of the blue, it gets fixed!

The only "plausible" explanation that I heard from someone else, was that something "flipped", since this is a new motherboard/CPU with the older install of my host's HD. 'memtest' from a bootable CD was run a couple of times, no issues.

My explanation (if any), was that something was in the middle of an update, and I simply lost the host in the middle of the update. When things returned to normal, all order was restored.

^[1]: I have the User Manuals for both motherboards if someone would like in depth information.