Posted by Jim at November 23rd, 2004

I do a bit of contracting. Some of it basically turns out to be technical support. Some of it turns out to be more interesting than that.

Unfortunately, the tale I’m about to tell falls into the former category. One of the people at ACCESS was having trouble with her email program (Microsoft Outlook). The program was taking an age to open, and, when it did the program would only show her archives–nothing recent.

Here’s why: Symantec’s Anti-virus program had quarantined her Outlook file because it contained a virus. Mind you, the virus couldn’t do anything in the file, but, because it did exist and the program couldn’t remove it, the Anti-virus program decided to get it off her computer.

Moving it out of quarantine did no good. It would just be quarantined again as soon as it came out. This was made more annoying by the fact that it was an old computer running Windows 98, 32 MB’s of RAM, a 200mhz CPU, and a nearly full hard drive.

In short, it crawled. Just restoring the outlook.pst file would take 5 minutes.

After much frustration and fussing about, I managed to solve the problem by excluding outlook.pst from “realtime virus protection.” Symantec’s program will still catch viruses if you click on an email, but will no longer quarantine the file on the basis of a virus existing in the file.

What made things particularly ironic is that Symantec was responding to a virus that takes advantage of flaws in Outlook Express. She doesn’t have Outlook Express on her machine. She’s got Outlook. Thus, she was unable to use her email for hours due to an Anti-virus program quarantining her mail file because it contained a virus that couldn’t do her any harm.

As someone’s who’s never had a virus on his home machine (and very seldom at work), I sometimes wonder if anti-virus programs are worth the trouble.