Delays starting SafeExamBrowser.Client.exe process

[ag-12-2024]

We are approaching our end of semester exam diet and have just started to notice long delays on some (but not all) of the Windows 11 24H2 computers in our PC labs fully booting into our exam modes. For many of our exams, we automate a login to the Windows PCs (different logins for different exams) and then currently run SEB 3.8.0 as a kiosk application. We've been using this process for many years without issue and upgrading the version of SEB approximately once a year. I realise that SEB 3.10 is now available, but I prefer not to change versions during our academic year if at all possible.

In our windows logs we've noticed it generally takes about a minute from when the SafeExamBrowser.Service.exe process starts before the SafeExamBrowser.exe process starts, which is fine, but after that, on some PCs there are delays of between 15 and 60 minutes before the SafeExamBrowser.Client.exe process starts and we finally see the exam start page.

In testing some of the problematic PCs, we've noticed a Backup.bin file located in C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\SafeExamBrowser and this gets referenced in the SEB service log within the Logs folder of the same directory, where it's looking for registry hives that don't exist.

The 2 questions I have are:

1. What is the purpose of this Backup.bin file? If it's purpose isn't relevant to our needs, I will create a startup or login script that would check for its existence and delete it if found.

2. Would there be any expected network calls after the SafeExamBrowser.exe process starts and before the SafeExamBrowser.Client.exe process starts? I don't believe we have any network issues, as we've not experienced this issue in the past and a lot of our PCs aren't affected, but I just want to be able to rule it out as a possible cause. Our seb config files are pushed to each PCs hard drive before the Windows login process starts, so these files get called locally rather than from a network location.

Any help that can be provided will be gratefully received.

[dbuechel]

The startup delay is a known issue for version 3.8.0 (see #1023) and has been fixed starting with version 3.9.0, thus please update to the latest release version. The backup file serves the auto-restore mechanism of the SEB Service (e.g. in case a system resp. SEB has not been terminated normally) which on system startup attempts to restore potentially changed system configuration values to their original state.