I have a script I wrote that creates and writes to a file every 20 or 30 seconds and it has been doing that fine for the past 15 years or so on 5 versions of Windows, but I installed the outstanding security updates on one PC running the script (on Windows Embedded POSReady 2009) and it has stopped working. It has an error message of 'DOS error: 1307'. A separate VBScript called from an EXE process running as a service also no longer does its job (which also involves creating and writing to a file). However the VBScript works when run from the command line. The first script works as soon as I start capturing events with the latest version of Process Monitor (procmon v3.50). And I mean, immediately, so, although the script only tries to create the file every 20 or 30 seconds, it will be created immediately, not waiting until it would normally be created - as if the create command has been queued up somewhere and procmon has unblocked the queue. It continues working when I stop capturing events with Process Monitor, but stops working as soon as I close Process Monitor.
Why, or how, is Process Monitor affecting the behaviour of other processes? And how do I fix or diagnose the underlying problem, apparently caused by the Windows security updates.
(The first script is run inside a process created by a Windows service and uses a commercial visual IDE to compile it, but is not really a programming language. There is a 3rd program that looks for both files - created by the 1st two scripts - reads them, sends on the data to a remote server, and deletes the local files, and that is working fine, except that these 2 data pieces are missing when procmon is not running.)
Similar question, but the answer was not accepted, the scenario is different, and the answer is not relevant to my question: Running Process Monitor causes application to work