Recently I’ve been seeing more people having problems with Norton Anti-Virus giving false positives on various viewers used with Second Life and OpenSim. The problem us usually the file slplugin.exe. The SL & OS viewers run multiple copies of file. So, a false positive renders the viewer unusable.
Today I saw this article: Symantec Software Update Rendered Many PCs Useless. It basically says if you have Windows XP and update your Norton Anti-Virus, it will eat your computer. Poof! You are down with no way to find out how to fix the problem.
Warn your friends that run Windows XP.
If you are a Norton AV user, consider moving to another AV program. Microsoft makes a free anti-virus program for Windows that is pretty good. It called Microsoft Security Essentials. It uses far fewer resources then Norton. So, you should see your computer speed up.
Neither Norton’s nor Microsoft’s AV appear in several AV Top Ten reviews of retail AV packages. I think that is a clue that AV makers are paying to be in those reviews. Generally Microsoft makes it into the top 10.
I prefer ESET for Anti-Virus, but that an opinion. I have not done personal tests for some time. But, I have found there email support good and reasonable fast, 1 business day.
Avast Free Anti-Virus is very popular. It is the top download on Cnet. It gets good, not great, reviews on performance and security.
I have recently installed Avast Free Antivirus to give it a try as a possible substitution to Comodo, a free antivirus set with the same features of the Avast set. I am getting tired of Comodo because of a number of false positives and other nuisances. I have installed Avast on two different computers, one Dell workstation and one Dell game-rigged machine, both with plenty of RAM and processing power and running Windows 7 64-bit. After installing Avast both computers slowed down to a crawl and were effectively unusable. I didn’t investigate on the reasons, the experience was enough to get rid of Avast.
I also run Microsoft Security Essentials on both computers but I don’t fully trust it (hence the reason why I run a second AV). I never see the MS AV catch anything or even run on its scheduled task, so I wonder on how effective it is.
If you run two AV’s at the same time they tend to conflict because they attempt to do the same things at the same time and can lock up resources the other needs. Plus they delay other processes until they decide it is ok for them to run. They can bring a machine way down even if both AV’s are fast. Run only one AV.
I have several clients running just MS Security Essentials. They have been fine for the 2 to 3 years they have run it. The MS AV gets good marks for detection and few false positives.
Norton is not reacting so much to slplugin.exe as to Suspicious.MLApp contained within it. When this is a problem it is a simple matter to go to Advanced > History and find it (should be at or near the top of the list) Then restore.
I have used Norton for years on all of my active machines. Sometimes it overreacts but better safe than sorry.