hi,

i just installed Symantec Antivirus corporate edition v8.1 and found that i could not scan manually. after doing some research, it appeared that this program is dependent on explorer. i logged into my admin account and tried manually scanning with explorer running and Symantec is scanning right now.

i was wondering if anyone has found a work-around for this. i can't function without litestep. :(

being so incredibly impatient, i decided to try something. the article on symantec's web site refers to a registry edit so that explorer gets recognized correctly....

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ent-security.nsf/552ba2f7636bedf088256818006f78bf/9f3bb83b13e1be7e88256a220026a5d5

i changed "Explorer.exe" to "litestep.exe" and manual scanning seems to work now...

now i only wonder what i may have broken by doing this... anyone? :)

if i'm not mistaken, Omar's installer sets the current user registry string to litestep as the shell, but manually changing the HKLM shell string to litestep.exe wont harm or change anything past what you already have if you have litestep on your system.

essentially you just set litestep as the shell for all users instead of the current user. no big deal.

I have been using NAV 8.1 and litestep for ages and it works fine. Litestep is only currently set to the shell for me and not everyone.

i'd like to add something i learned recently as a side note: symantec antivirus does not have the capability to scan inside RAR files. seeing that this is a community that frequently downloads things off the net, this is a big feature missing. it made me seriously rethink my choice of AV.

something to think about.

The thing about scanning archives is, well, where does it stop? Almost every compression program has its own format. So when do you stop supporting compressed archives? Do you support .tar files? How about gzipped tar files? What if the extension has been changed to .tgz, ala Slackware? How about the two 7zip formats? How about .bz2? These may seem like ridiculously obscure compression formats- but not to your *nix user- and many power users have things like Cygwin or SFU on their windows boxen. Which means those formats will be present, and may need to be scanned. They aren't supported (I assume), because the percentage of users who download them regularly is small. The same with the number of users who download .rar files. Actually, the last time I saw a .rar file was two years ago...

i see your point, but i assure you .rar is a very large percentage compared to the ones you've listed, and speakng as someone who does a lot of downloading, .rar is the most used format i've seen by a wide margin.

i'm just giving this info out as advice for people who might have a lot of .rar files on their pc and didnt know that symantec couldn't scan them.

and for the question of where does it stop, well, kaspersky antivirus supports over 700 compression formats, so as long as you got a good AV, it shouldn't matter what format you use.

Well, rar is pretty popular if you d/l files of IRC, especially big files, licke cd images and stuff. I agree that symantec should add that feature.

mungo23, i'm not sure why i had a problem you don't, but it seems to be working for me now. i used NAV 2003 for a while -- i'm not sure why i had trouble with SAV 8.1.

disgraceful, i used the latest installer and upgraded to RC3 right away. litestep seems to be running fine. and i don't think i set litestep as the default shell because when i log in as administrator, i get the explorer shell. ...and no problems. the only thing i notice that's peculiar (for a clean install) is that shutdown times are very long. but that could be related to anything...

yeah, i thought i noticed that. Omar's installer sets the current user shell string to litestep, not the global string. that's a good thing, so if you run into any problems you can always log in as admin and be back to explorer.

and let me tell you..... NAV and SAV are completely different products. i met a guy from symantec once and even he said they stopped developing the norton AV a while ago. there's a reason they give that out for free with pc's......

db: Do you have an nvidia gfx card? cause I had problems with long shtdowns quite a long time ago (sp1 wasn't even out I think), and I fixed it by disabling the "nVidia driver helper" service.

i do have an nvidia card, but i never had problems before. i'm guessing its hardware-related because my system was suddenly corrupted last friday morning. i had to manually repair and couldn't finish because all the registry files were gone. i managed to get into windows (win2k sp4, btw) and i backed up all my data over the network to my wife's dvd burner. i then reinstalled everything clean. now it takes up 2-3 minutes to shutdown...

i'll try what you suggest though. would it be the same as the "NVIDIA Display Driver Service"?

Probably, yes. I remember looking it up on google and finding out it did nothing at all, except cause problems with long shutdowns, and other stuff. That is in winxp, though, dunno if win2k has the same problem.

I have Litestep with Nav Corperate 9.x on my laptop and I don't have any problems doing a manual scan. How, I did have some problems with 8.1 which prompted me to upgrade to 9.x. Maybe it was this, I don't recall since I didn't do any research on the error itself (thought it was a virus since there was a massive outbreak apperently in our local network at work one day).