Update:
I let the SM service try to start for a few minutes on the test server, without success.
At some point the process was eating 95% of the server RAM and CPU started to load like crazy.
I had to kill the process.
Update 2:
I suspect this entry in the changelog:
Added: Windows Defender is now available as an anti-virus option and is enabled by default.
As we do all scanning work on frontend servers and to avoid unecessary resource usage, we remove windows defender from the servers running SmarterMail.
As it is enabled by default like stated in the changelog, could it be that SM tries to communicate with it at startup and loop on this ?
Update 3:
As susected readding Windows Defender on the system resolved the startup issue on the test server.
However we don't want to re-add windows defender on the prod system. Is there a way to disable this "enabled by default" new windows defender option in before updating so the service can start ?
Final update:
We had to re-install Windows Defender on the prod server, do the SmarterMail update, go to Antivirus settings and disable everything for windows defender then remove again Windows Defender.
Now the new build starts correctly.
It would be great to check if Windows defender is installed before activating it by default...
Kind regards