GlobalProtect Agent constantly 'Not Responding'.

[VincentWC]

This problem has been intermittent in the past, and has escalated to make the program full-on unusable.

To explain what I mean, I'm talking about this — 

IF and when I can even get the UI to pop up, it will quickly, almost immediately hang in an unresponsive state.

Apparently no one on Google has seen this happen at all. I'm not a direct customer of Palo Alto, so I can't submit a work item or support ticket to them. I've confirmed with our local IT that our security (Crowd Strike) is not blocking the program.

I've tried uninstalling the program, deleting Software/PaloAltoNetworks entries from the windows registry, removing the local app data, removing the Program Files folder, stopping the WMI service and deleting the webm/Repository folder from the Windows Sys32 directory, killing the PanGPA task (the service automatically restarts it), disabling the windows startup of the PanGPA application, running GlobalProtect as an administrator (all things suggested by ChatGPT and other humans), and restarting my computer between each step so many times I've lost count; the issue persists.

It did stop for a couple of days this week (yesterday and Monday), but it just started happening again today.

I've attached the log files for the service and agent program to this work item.

I'm pretty desperate, and also getting pretty frustrated at this point, as the IT department for the customer we do work for (the actual palo alto client) has closed the ticket I asked them to open, and as I stated above, NOWHERE on google is this specific issue being described. The next step would be formatting my system, which is a bit of an extreme step to fix this stupid problem.

Any help, tips, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[BPry · Accepted solution]

@VincentWC,

Unfortunately there's little guidance that anyone on the forums can give you without being able to view the client logs, which are not something you should be sharing with strangers on the internet and were likely removed from your post. Any time that I've seen similar issues, it has always been a system issue that was not present for anyone else in the environment and not a widespread issue. That probably isn't the answer that you want to hear, but that would be a logical next step given what you've provided if there was not anything abundantly clear in your PanGPA.log file (which since it's becoming unresponsive, there shouldn't really be anything hear that would point towards an issue). 

Something you could try if you're desperate to avoid that would be to run a virtual machine on your existing system to use to reach this client's resources, assuming that they don't require specific checks to access resources and a VM would actually work for you. Personally a dedicated VM for each client is what I would recommend to any contractor or service provider anyways, as it makes everything easier to manage and ensures that any legal proceedings wouldn't sprawl outside of the VM dedicated to that customer/client. 

[VincentWC]

In that case I'm glad they removed it. I didn't see anything in there that would have been sensitive or what not, but better to err on the side of caution.

As to the 'Use a VM' idea, that's... I wish I'd thought of that lol. It's a brilliant solution and when the client starts throwing a fit again (as it started working again by some minor miracle), I'll definitely pursue that avenue.

Thanks very much for the suggestion, and given the limited amount of information I can share, I'll mark this as the accepted solution for now.

Thanks again.