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Avast! (and many others) use heuristics also.

Only their routines don't delete softwares you just paid good money to obtain. They may quarantine, but they don't just blanket automatically delete.



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Thanks for that advice Richard. I have now changed my setting.

What about the "Remove Risks if I am away" setting?

Also, why do you have "Enable Boot Time Protection" switched off?

However, I think you are both wrong about a software developer not doing something about a problem that could affect 10% of their customers. I will admit that you do have to get moving on an issue like that a bit before the release. Like I said before, the company I work with thought it was necessary after experiencing a similar problem. True, our development staff does not like this situation and feel a little bit like some of the opinions expressed here. It's just that customers are more important in the general scheme of wanting to be a successful software development company selling on a worldwide basis.

I'll tell you what. I would like to have a company that had 10% share of the worldwide market for antivirus software, as do Symantec Norton. That is a ginormous customer base and one has to take notice.


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Chart jford posted above looks like less than 5% to me.

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Originally Posted By: Graham Martin
Thanks for that advice Richard. I have now changed my setting.

What about the "Remove Risks if I am away" setting?

Also, why do you have "Enable Boot Time Protection" switched off?



Hi Graham,
I'm mostly concerned with stopping Norton from interfering with and deleting files that I have consciously chosen to download and/or install. I've never really given any thought to what happens if I'm logged off so I didn't bother to change the "while I'm away" setting.

The "Enable Boot Time Protection" is switched off by default and I figured (right or wrong) that enabling it would only slow down my boot up time.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with your comments. How hard would it be for the software to ask the user before blindly deleting genuine software installation files? That's all that is required and should be the default behaviour.

Regards


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Originally Posted By: RWilliams
...How hard would it be for the software to ask the user before blindly deleting genuine software installation files? That's all that is required and should be the default behaviour.




Well stated.


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I have Norton on my BIAB laptop, but I haven't installed V2014 yet.
Just so I understand, if I follow Richard's instructions and change the option to "Ask Me", what will happen when Norton does its automatic scans? Will it again "Ask me" or one you have nominated the file as being kosher, will Norton ignore it in the future?
TIA


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Keith,
When I downloaded all the 2014 files Norton "File Insight" flagged them all as unsafe. However, I was able to tell it they were trusted and they all installed no problems. The downloaded files have since been scanned by Norton's automatic scans without incident.

You can tell Norton that a file you already have is trusted by right-clicking on the file, selecting Norton -> File Insight and if it says the file is unsafe tell it that it's trusted.
Regards


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Richard, you've posted some great tips! I did the same think you suggest above and told Norton File Insight to "trust" my installation files. No problems after that.

I guess it is getting lonely being a Norton user. It was just a few short years ago that Norton dominated the market. Wikipedia still says that Norton has 61% of the US market share as of 2007. Fast forward to 2013 and that is dropping fast (North America share looks like it is still 16% based on quick google search). Many windows computers are still shipped with it as OEM software, but looks like that is not enough.

Originally Posted By: VideoTrack
Originally Posted By: RWilliams
...It is laughable to suggest that PG Music, or any other software manufacturer, is in any way at fault because they haven't first sought permission from Symantec to release a new product. Imagine the delays if every software developer in the world had to first clear every new release or upgrade through Symantec first.

Hi Richard, thanks for the post, you are exactly correct: "It is laughable to suggest that PG Music is in any way at fault because they haven't first sought permission from Symantec to release a new product."


I think the above misses the point. Of course PGMusic isn't at fault for the behavior of Norton AV, yet it is still a software developer's responsibility to check that their software runs as desired on the end user's computer. This means testing it in a variety of OS and antivirus configurations, e.g., through beta testing. The need for antivirus software is a reality, and software companies do take the additional measures to ensure that their software is compatible. It is great that PGMusic has such a loyal following. (And yes, I am one of those loyal followers). Many posts I see on this forum have members ready to come to PGMusic's defense at the barest hint of a slight. However, as Graham stated above, this is a marketing issue. The harder it is to install a piece of software, the less likely a customer will become a repeat customer.

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You mentioned this should have been caught in beta testing.

I'm not taking a position on any Norton software, as I haven't used it in decades. If I did still use it, however, the first thing I would do in beta testing is disable it (and anything else running) before installing the PG Music software. So, I don't know how well beta testing is going to work to alert PG Music to a potential problem.


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Originally Posted By: RWilliams
Keith,
When I downloaded all the 2014 files Norton "File Insight" flagged them all as unsafe. However, I was able to tell it they were trusted and they all installed no problems. The downloaded files have since been scanned by Norton's automatic scans without incident.

You can tell Norton that a file you already have is trusted by right-clicking on the file, selecting Norton -> File Insight and if it says the file is unsafe tell it that it's trusted.
Regards

Thanks Richard, your advice is appreciated.
BTW, I'm just down the road from you, in the 'Gong.


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Originally Posted By: Keith from Oz
BTW, I'm just down the road from you, in the 'Gong.


Thanks Keith,
You're not far away at all. I live in the "Shire".
Regards


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All the Aussies coming out of the woodwork.

BTW Richard, I do not disagree that the default action for Norton antivirus should be to ask the user and not to automatically delete any files. That's crazy stuff from Symantec. All I was saying is what Elkayem has now said better; about the developer beta testing to ensure that the installation files have no problems with the common software people use.

I do not remember my previous Norton antivirus having the same settings and defaults. I think they must have changed when I upgraded Nortons about six months back. I certainly did not change any defaults and that appears to have been the main problem.

Just be a bit careful Keith, because if you read my original post, you will see that originally I was able to restore the deleted Setup.exe file myself. I then switched off Nortons and did the install. That was fine but when Nortons came back after the 15 minutes, it deleted the Band-in-a-Box.exe and RealBand.exe files, so the whole installation was kyboshed. It took a very good Support guy from Symantec in India two hours to restore the files and get the full installation working. He made some changes to what Nortons sees as problem files but I do not know how he did this or what files. I just know I have a heap more entries in my Program files.

The good news is that 2014 does seem to be working well but I have many questions about changes that have been made.


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Thanks Graham,
I'll re-read all of these posts before I install in the New Year.


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I can't imagine using Norton again under ANY circumstances.

Norton is probably the worst "virus" you'll ever have.

It's been documented on here by numerous users so many times I'm surprised any forum user would even consider it.

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Personally, I can't agree that PG Music is in any way at fault for not sending its files to Symantec.

The AV program should not rely on every software manufacturer in the world sending them a copy of their exe file to put on the white list.

There are dozens of AV companies out there and thousands of app developers, should every software company send their exe files out to dozens of them too? Then Symantec would be bombarded by hundreds per day.

It's up to Symantec to design their Norton AV product to work properly. If the file is questionable, the AV software should be designed to ask the user if he/she meant to download that file and if he/she wants to trust it.

AV products have flagged false positives since day one. This is no secret, and nobody knows that better than Symantec. Therefore to delete a suspected file that might be a false positive without asking the user if he/she wants to delete it or not, is just plain bad programming.

My AV product asks for everything. I set the controls that way. So even if the app is on the blacklist, it gives me the message and asks if I want to treat it or not.

If I were still a Norton AV user, I would write to them and let them know they need to install the feature to let the end user decide if he/she wants to delete the suspected file or not.

That's my 2 cents anyway.

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Hi,

We do try to minimize problems like this. For example, we scanned all of the .exe's with "VirusTotal". The detection ratio for all of the files was 0/47, "all clean" including Symantec. We also digitally signed the .exe's.

If you see any issues with your particular anti-virus software, we would certainly appreciate if you email that info to support.. We might miss it if you just post on the forum.

It is difficult to avoid running into problems with the "reputation-" and "behaviour-based" detection algorithms that have become very popular in recent years, since pretty much any new and "uncommon" file is fair game for detection. And let's face it, distributing an 80GB program on hard drive is not that typical...


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I just thought I should let Norton anti virus users know that I had another problem when downloading the latest update 380. Nortons did not delete it this time but it did say it was a bad file and recommended that I do so. Also when I ran the program first time with the update installed, it gave me another warning message.

This is all becoming too difficult and, despite the fact that Nortons has always given my computer excellent protection, I decided to try another anti virus. As a consequence I have uninstalled Nortons and installed Microsoft Security Essentials.

If I get a computer virus, guess who I am going to blame. grin


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After reading this thread, I put the whole BB folder as an exemption in Norton and also disabled Norton whilst I installed BIAB. Once it was installed I then ran a complete scan and since then everything has been fine.
So thanks for the warnings and a bit a forethought means no problems.
Cheers Steve

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