Norton Antivirus 2006

[Guest]

NAV 2006 Quickscan appears to have a problem when the number of "startup"
files exceeds a certain level. After processing about 700 or so files it
loops consuming 80-90% of the CPU without only minimal file count
progression. Response of other processes is severely impaired giving the
impression that the system has frozen.

Windows Task Manager reports that process Navw32.exe that has been logging
about 1000 I/O Reads per second is now getting no I/O read activity. The
problem starts when the Handles stat reaches ~500 suggesting some sort of
file management table overflow. NAV 2005 on a similarly configured system
only processes 110 startup files and never encounters this limit. NAV 2006
may be including more files in this "startup" class.

A bypass is to UNCHECK the NAV Options / Manual Scan / Scan active programs
and startup files as well as NAV Options / Liveupdate/ Run Quickscan on
definitions update. A successful full system scan with these options turned
off showed no detectable viruses. Also a check_disk reported no problems with
the drive itself.

Symantec now has an open case for this problem.

 

[Don MI]

Symantec Technical support:

http://service.symantec.com/index.html

Don

 

[Lem]

NAV 2006 Quickscan appears to have a problem when the number of "startup"
files exceeds a certain level. After processing about 700 or so files it
loops consuming 80-90% of the CPU without only minimal file count
progression. Response of other processes is severely impaired giving the
impression that the system has frozen.

Windows Task Manager reports that process Navw32.exe that has been logging
about 1000 I/O Reads per second is now getting no I/O read activity. The
problem starts when the Handles stat reaches ~500 suggesting some sort of
file management table overflow. NAV 2005 on a similarly configured system
only processes 110 startup files and never encounters this limit. NAV 2006
may be including more files in this "startup" class.

A bypass is to UNCHECK the NAV Options / Manual Scan / Scan active programs
and startup files as well as NAV Options / Liveupdate/ Run Quickscan on
definitions update. A successful full system scan with these options turned
off showed no detectable viruses. Also a check_disk reported no problems with
the drive itself.

Symantec now has an open case for this problem.

Is there an incident number or some other way to track this on the Symantec
site? Or could you post a follow-up if -- when -- Symantec resolves this?

 

[Guest]

Norton Antivirus Ver 12.0.0.94 has this problem. I will keep this chain
updated with the progress from Symantec.

 

[Richard Urban]

He has already been in contact with Symantec. If you read to the end, he is
just giving us a "heads up"!

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Guest]

The Symantec support page http://service.symantec.com/index.html email link
sends the reported problem to:

(e-mail address removed)

Unfortunately this mail is getting bounced back for some valid
(e-mail address removed) sending addresses with a message from
(e-mail address removed) indicating that the return address is
invalid (it isn't).

I had to resort to the rather cumbersome chat interface to get the problem
through. Symantec technical support refused to follow up the email failure
problem or even to forward an enquiry to (e-mail address removed)
(email to this address fails as well). This surprised me since this was a
failure of their primary support interface.

 

[Guest]

The problem persists into NAV 2006 ver 12.1.0.20 but I have managed to
isolate a small (80kb) executable file that demonstrates the failure. A
request to virus scan this single file causes Navw32.exe to go into an I/O
read loop (45 million! I/O reads after only 30 mins) with a large appetite
for CPU time. The only way to stop it is to reboot the system. This same file
had been on the system since 2002 and scanned many-many-many times before
without incident using NAV 2005.

The good news is that this problem appears to be data content sensitive and
may not occur on most systems. I am continuing to work with Symantec to try
and isolate the nature of the failure.

 

[Guest]

NAV 2006 ver 12.2.0.13 no longer loops on the test file so the problem
appears to have been fixed.