Either my Google search skills are degrading or the signal-to-noise ratio on this topic is so high only the noise comes through. Either way, I am posting a fix I should think would be easy to find but wasn’t…How to complete Visual Studio Code (VSC) updates with Malwarebytes Premium installed.

To say I found no answer is a bit of an exaggeration. I found several that were just plain unhelpful, and one that worked, but not acceptably. The first time this was an issue, I found an unacceptable solution (I say an, because I don’t consider removing Malwarebytes to be a solution, nor any of the less-polite suggestions of what to do with it) was to turn off Malwarebytes to run the update. While this works, every-vigilant Windows thinks it is an opportunity to win back territory for Defender and starts it, which prevents re-starting Malwarebytes. Being a busy techie, re-starting Windows is a long task because I always have at least 20 applications running.

So when the issue came up again today, I dove back into to the deeper Google waters, i.e., page 2 of the results, and did find a suggestion to temporarily uncheck “Enable Protection”. This must have been referring to a different version, as that was not one of the options. There were several others that could be disabled. To cut a long story short (note that whenever that phrase is uttered is inevitably too late already), I went through the options one by one and found that one that allows the installation to complete: Ransomware Protection.

Here’s hoping this post saves someone some time.