Sophos stops working when my mac starts up

This sounds like one of your plist files has become corrupted or has the wrong file permissions set.

What is the result of following the instructions here?

http://openforum.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Anti-Virus-for-Mac-Home/Quarantine-Manager-will-not-unlock/m-p/9166#M4417

You may need to remove one of your plist files (which don't get removed by uninstalling the product) as indicated here:

http://openforum.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Anti-Virus-for-Mac-Home/COMPLETELY-uninstall-delete-Sophos-Anti-Virus-from-Mac-please/td-p/2349/jump-to/first-unread-message

(do not remove your log files or the other plist files not flagged by plutil in the first linki).

If you need more help on the details, just ask for help here.

Thanks for the directions.

UPDATE: the problem has been happening every day this week but did not happen today. Having been in IT for a long time I think it may be a code problem. This can be reproduced: My wife uses her MBP (MacBook Pro) at work and uses an RJ45 and turns off wifi. She shuts down her MBP before leaving work. When she gets home, plugs it in and turns it on. Yesterday she turned on wifi immediately and Sophos was OK (started update downloads). However, she usually walks away and turns on wifi a couple of minutes later. When she does this Sophos will be in the weird state I described before. Maybe this information will help.

This information is of significant help.

The best mitigation is likely to keep auto-updates and live protection disabled during the transfer from work to home; these are the two components that need a network connection.  Live Protection tries to connect right away, and throws an error if it fails -- auto updates usually waits a short time before attempting to connect.

My system is Apple iMac running OS X Lion 10.7.4 and I have been using Sophos version 8.0.6C for a couple of months with no problems.  Then I went on holiday and switched off my system and my router and wireless network completely for a week.  Since I restarted I have been unable to get Sophos to run properly.  The On-access facility has closed itself and defies all attempts to re start it from the Preferences panel.  I now find hundreds of competing threads on various discussion groups about this problem, but I am not willing to dredge through all of these.  Can someone at Sophos please give a nice simple step by step explanation for why the loss of functioning occurred and how to cure it.  There is nothing in the Help system that I can see.  I was considering opting into a paid-for version, but this occurrence for no good reason is making me think that I made a mistake in installing Sophos free version in the first place.

It is definitely related to WIFI since I shut mine down after reading here and connected through Ethernet and it worked.

Surprised it's taking so long to conquer (unless of course this has been resolved elsewhere on these boards)

The program used to work well, and I too was considering purchasing for a niece but she'd never be able to trouble shoot something like this.

A program like this should just work, and self-heal with updates, have redundancy to do that.. especially on a Mac.

Noticed smililar problem yesterday, I have today done a full uninstall and re install and everything for me is working well again,

updated and restarted computer, shield icon returns to menu bar

---

netcompany wrote:

The program used to work well, and I too was considering purchasing for a niece but she'd never be able to trouble shoot something like this.

A program like this should just work, and self-heal with updates, have redundancy to do that.. especially on a Mac.

---

I agree about the "Just Works" side of things -- and for most people it does.  There will always be edge cases in computer software, but we do try to overcome those that are repeatable.

As for purchasing the software... if anyone is selling you a copy of Sophos Home Edition for Mac, ask for a refund -- it's free from the website with no registration needed.  Registration's needed for this community support forum, but that's mostly to keep out the spam bots.

I had this happen for the first time today (on-access scanner turns off and greys out in the menu).   Since rebooting doesn't seem to help anyone, I did not bother.  Instead, I went to the Console, where I found this message:

8/30/13 1:47:12.774 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[143]: (com.sophos.uiserver[53228]) Exited: Killed: 9
8/30/13 1:47:17.540 PM com.apple.launchd[1]: (com.sophos.intercheck[44628]) Exit timeout elapsed (20 seconds). Killing

A quick search in Terminal (using the locate command) for com.sophos.intercheck shows

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.sophos.intercheck.plist

which contains /Library/Sophos Anti-Virus/InterCheck.app/Contents/MacOS/InterCheck so I logged in as root and launched InterCheck manually from the command line.  I probably should have used launchctl, but I just entered "/Library/Sophos Anti-Virus/InterCheck.app/Contents/MacOS/InterCheck" at the prompt.  InterCheck launched and did a few things for 7-10 seconds, but the shield when back to black and Sophos preferences now says On-access scan is enabled.  Might not be necessary to launch as root, but probably is.

Sounds like InterCheck met an error it couldn't handle and couldn't recover to relaunch.  Could be a memory issue - OS X from 10.6 on leaks memory badly.  I hope the above information helps diagnose this and for users to get back working in the meantime.  

The only oddity I am now experiencing is that the Sophos preferences pane shows a locked icon, and will not let me unlock it.  Manually scanning also only lets me scan as the current user, and does not ask me to authenticate to a user with higher privileges.

10.8.4, 5G Ram, Unibody Macbook