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Given up (temporarily) on Sophos for Mac

JohnW

For reasons that I won't go into, I have been using Sophos on Macintosh 10.7 Lion for rather longer than most people, and have had no problems. Following the latest update, I found that I had frequent frequent crashes with fairly banal applications used one at a time, Safari, Microsoft Office Outlook, Console, Terminal, with frozen screen, no access to menus, and the only way of shutting down being to hold down the power button.  I noticed, when Activity Monitor was working, that Sophos was typically using  around 78% of the CPU for things like updating, then failing to return the memory, resulting in up to 3.4GB of my total 4GB being in the blue "Inactive" area (as opposed to "Free").  Deleting Sophos resolved the difficulties, and current memory use is typically half of the total. I tried reinstalling, and the first crash came within minutes.  I like Sophos, and have a "paid for" version running on my Windows virtual machine, but will not be using it on the Mac side until I have evaluated a future update.

    Pity! 

:1003703


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    Me too. I uninstalled using the provided Remove program.

    However, I noticed that when I right-click on a file, I still see "Scan Now with Sophos Anti-Virus" as an option. If I choose that, the Finder locks up and needs to be relaunched.

    Any idea how to get rid of the menu option?

    :1003729
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    Does the menu item still exist after you've relaunched the Finder?  The finder doesn't update this list until after the first relaunch.  If the item is still there, check for /Library/Contextual Menu Items/Sophos Anti-Virus.plugin .  This is supposed to be removed by the uninstaller, but if it isn't, this is what loads the menu.

    :1003735
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    Hi Andrew,

    Thanks for the help.

    The menu item still exists after relaunching Finder.

    There's nothing in /Library/Contextual Menu Items/ at all (user or top-level), which is a bit strange because I know have other contextual menu item plugins.

    Thanks,

    Andro

    :1003737
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    If a logout/reboot doesn't clear the issue, you may have to clear the finder cache.  Since the path I posted is where the bundle is located that the Finder loads, it has to still be cached somewhere.

    :1003739
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    There are two places where contextual menu plugins are loaded from.

    One is:  /Library/Contextual Menu Items/ 

    the other is: /Users/<username>/Library/Contextual Menu Items/

    The difference being the first is global (for all users) the second is just for that specific user. Sophos installs itself in the global one, but please make sure you check both places and that you're not confusing teh User one with the global one.

    :1003741
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    JohnW-can you share the hardware specs on your machine?  Also, were you using a clean install of Lion or were you using something built upon Developer Builds?

    Important questions as I consider Sophos.

    :1003765
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    Sorry it has taken me so long to reply.

        The earliest iMac that can run Lion: "late 2006" 5.1 Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GHz processor, 4GB memory (though it can only use about 3.2GB), currently (since this morning) running Lion 10.7.1.  Lion was installed as part of an erase and reinstall.  For reasons that I won't go into, I had been using Sophos with Lion without problems for some months, but the last Sophos update made things stop working.  I do not doubt that all will be well with a future version of the program. At some point, I may even give the current version a try with 10.7.1.

    :1003787
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    Me too. It generally locks up during a time machine back up. Sophos really needs to fix this I may have to go back to Clam.

    :1004045
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    JohnW don't bother I have 10.7.1 and it still crashes I have no issue if  I turn off the realtime scanner.  Sent my logs to Apple and they are looking into it. 

    :1004047
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    Does it still crash if you turn on the on-access scanner but turn off scanning inside archives and compressed files?  How about if you exclude some folders (test excluding your Users folder, System folder, etc. to narrow down the culprit)?

    :1004051
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