Sophos keeps keeps shutting my (Snow Leopard) monitor down - but it doesn't lose power

Sophos and MacScan work fine together, so I'd have to guess that the culprit is Sophos combined with AVG LinkScanner (I have not tested this myself).  Either that, or there's some other conflict at issue here.  Have you opened up Console.app and checked your logs for error messages yet?

I don't know how to do this; I'm not that advanced. Can you e-mail me simple instructions?

Thank you.

Joel Kellner<>jerseyjoel@gmail.com

I'll put them in here so that others can figure it out too :)

1. press command-space
2. type Console.app
3. Console.app should be highlighted as the top hit
4. press return
5. a window opens with a bunch of text displayed and a listing of files down the left.

Places to check:

• DATABASE SEARCHES > Console Messages
• FILES > system.log
•             > ~/Library/Logs > CrashReporter >
•             > Sophos Anti-Virus >
•             > /Library/Logs > CrashReporter>
•                                         > Sophos Anti-Virus.log
•                                          > kernel.log
•                                          > system.log
•                                          > windowserver.log

There's a lot of stuff to go through there, most of it fairly technical, some of it errors, some of it purely informative diagnostic information.  Searching for key words like "sophos" "intercheck" "video" "failure" and "error" using the search dialog might help you find what you're looking for.

It's possible you won't find anything.  However, you might find that your computer's been trying to tell you something you need to fix in your system.log or in Console Messages that isn't even related to any of this software.  Always worth a quick check in these places if you're having problems.

To more easily diagnose things, take a look at these logs, then restart with the software removed and look at them again -- check and see how the logs differ, and you've likely found the messages that have to do with your problem.

I have had these programs running together without problems. It is of course not much help when people just say "it hasn't happened to me."

I uninstalled avg linkscanner because in order to use it, I more or less had to shut down Little Snitch.  Somehow, in setting little snitch to allow  linkscanner do its thing, it also allowed applications ti  calling home, whether the applications were given permission to do so or not.   I even had iAntivirus installed and  running with together with Sophos with no crashes (though I uninstalled iAntivirus as I didn't know what would happen if the two programs ran into the same threat).

I have used other antivirus products on the Mac, and I have had weird things happen (particularly with Virus Barrier).  So try uninstalling the Sophos and see if the bad behavior stops.  You can always reinstall. 

Some time ago I tried to buy Sophos antivirus from the Beijing agent because it seemed to be the least intrusive of all the antivirus software I have tried for the Mac. I think I have tried them all!  I was told I couldn't buy it here, and I was reluctantly preparing to buy a a competing antivirus product when Sophos made the home addition available.  

I have four Macs running in my home;  all of them are, and were,  similarly configured.