MyEpson Portal causing shutdown problems

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Lenovo desktop. 64-bit. Intel core. Win 8.1.
This machine has been stable/reliable and recently joined Group A, with help from PKCano.

Background: my Epson Stylus SX218 printer died in June 2018, just when needed for work. So, I bought a new printer and disposed of the Epson, along with installation cds etc.

Problem: mep.exe
Every night, I back up and shut down the machine (old habits die hard). Recently, ‘shut down’ produced this error message … see below. I clicked OK; the machine shut down; next day, computer started and ran as usual.

Research showed that this related to Epson … My Epson Portal. Since I no longer needed anything ‘Epson’, I used Control Panel to uninstall the 2 Epson entries.

But the problem continued. One night, I had a BSOD and had to shut down manually via power button.
Then, I tried a system restore to a point before the uninstall but got a message saying it couldn’t complete and I needed to disable my anti-virus. Should I have tried again, via Safe Mode? As it was getting late, I stopped.

Since then, two actions worked OK for shutting down: clicking ‘close program’ on error message OR ending mep.exe via Task Manager.

What do do now? Clearly the uninstall of Epson didn’t do the job. Looking at Program Files (x86), Epson files are still on my machine. Should I delete these and if so, how to do it safely?
Many thanks in advance for any help and advice.

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Right click on the Taskbar and open Task Manager.
On the Startup tab, right click any Epson process and choose “Disable”

In the search box type “msconfig” (without quotes) and open System Configuration.
On the Services tab check the box “Hide all Microsoft services”
Uncheck any Epson services.
Click “Apply”

Reboot the computer and see if that stops the popup.

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Following up on what PKCano said, after you “hide all Microsoft services”, you may see something other than the Epson services which you don’t need. You can also uncheck those items.

Examples of things you don’t need:
* Google updater
* HP updater

Examples of items you do need:
* Antivirus software

If you aren’t sure whether a service is needed or not, you can uncheck it (to disable it) then reboot, to see if everything works fine afterward. If there are problems, you can always go back into MSCONFIG and reenable the service that you just disabled.

An additional benefit you will gain from disabling unneeded services is that doing so could speed up your computer. So if you can disable all of the unneeded services, and keep all of the needed services, you won’t have all of that unneeded stuff running in the background and slowing down the computer.

Some of the unneeded services don’t take up much memory, so disabling them may not make any noticeable difference. However, some of them use lots of memory, so disabling them will make a noticeable difference in performance. And in your case, some services may have bugs, causing problems for your computer; disabling them will fix the problems.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Thanks for speedy replies. All makes sense. Followed PKCano’s advice and reboot went smoothly. Will continue with MrJimPhelps’ advice and monitor.

Question: shall I just leave all the Epson files as and where they are? Sleeping dogs and all that.

Thanks so much again.

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It doesn’t really matter about the files; as long as none of them are running, the only thing they are doing is taking up a little bit of space on your hard drive.

If you are sure that you are deleting only the Epson files, you could delete those folders. That’s what I would do. If you are pretty sure (but not 100%), then you could rename those folders and see what happens. At some point, when you realize that no problems resulted from your renaming the folders, you can delete the folders.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Makes absolute sense. Will do.

Thanks once again to you and PKCano. What a great resource this site is!

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and constantly displaying annoying popup windows, uninstall things that annoy and guess what, very soon you will ditch windows and just run chrome or Linux

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Thanks for reporting, I have observed similar issues. After removing the program things are now running normal.

I am curious why this is happening just now? Windows 10, 2020 May update?

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