Message says "Sophos Anti-Virus is not running"

I am downloading the diagnositic now. Will it make a difference as I deleted Sophos a couple of hours ago? 

I am willing to reinstall if that will make things easier.

Hi Bob

Any luck with fixing this issue, which seems to have affected lots of people?

I guess I do have a business of sorts and am happy to pay for a business version.  However, I don't have time to mess around with my Mac - in any case Macs, despite their virtues, have very few options to change/fix things. 

I have reinstalled Sophos and the same error message appeared as in the thread title.  Sophos 8.0.15C  Mac OS 10.8.4.  However, it does seem to be scanning local drives successfully and is about 20% done.  Would browsing privately have anything to do with this?

If nothing happens soon I'll ask my mac tech to recommend another virus scanner or search in my computer magazine for one.

Having same issue over here ~ now occurs on 2 of 3 Mac's running. I know its free but it does no good when it no longer works... Submitted SDU archive from both Mac's... hopefully there will be a remedy soon otherwise it is ""Hasta la vista, baby".

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wombat wrote:

I have reinstalled Sophos and the same error message appeared as in the thread title.  Sophos 8.0.15C  Mac OS 10.8.4.  However, it does seem to be scanning local drives successfully and is about 20% done.  Would browsing privately have anything to do with this?

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Hi,

The message applies to the on-access scanner. The on-demand and scheduled scans would be unaffected by this issue.

We have made some improvements in version 9 (preview release this week) that should address this problem in a number of circumstances. Its been difficult to track down what is causing it, as the logs don't really indicate what has gone wrong and also we've been unable to reproduce this in our lab. But that hasn't prevented us from making some tactical changes in potential areas.

Thanks, Bob.

The "Scan local drives" stops at about 30% done.  This has happened the last two times.  However, the error message "Sophos Anti-Virus is not running" hasn't appeared all week.

I'll wait for the next update and see how it goes.

Cheers

Hi, I'm expericiening this very same issue. I have removed and re-installed the product today

I'm currently running a scan that has not bombed out yet

I'm keen for this to be resolved or sadly I may have to use and alternate product

(Yes I do appreciate this is free but I want to be protected)

Cheers

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wedgy2k wrote:

Hi, I'm expericiening this very same issue. I have removed and re-installed the product today

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Be sure to upgrade to version 9 (the link to the upgrade tool is in the top posts of the front page) it resolves many issues related to scanning.

Hi,

I have Sophos Free for Mac installed running on Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and there are several things of concern,:

It says tha Sophos runs quietly in the background but how do you know?

I have set it to open on log as otherwise I get a message saying that it is not working. Although  I keep it on the dock it now opens up on the screen which I do not want as I then have to close it again. I just want it working on the dock.

I have set up a scan with my external drive excluded and it just sits there calculating but going no further.

When it has done a scan in the past there is no indication of how long it will taket. The shield on the dock stays white with blue suuround and S but it has never gone black.

I am sorry to ask all of this but there are such simplistic comments about everrthing just running that I do not understand it. If it runs all the time what is the point of the scheduler?

Any clarification would be helpful. ;)

Hello Hughmoz,

The "black shield" that is mentioned in the documentation should appear in the menu bar. It will be a black outline when the on-access scanner is enabled, and will turn grey when the on-access scanner is disabled. If the software is working normally, it shows an "S" in the middle of the shield. You'll see an "X" if there is an issue. Click the shield icon to get a menu, the first entry typically tells you the status.

The dock icon is always blue & white and doesn't show any status information. Most people leave the regular program closed, only opening it if they need to adjust a scan schedule, or change preferences, or run a manual scan.

As for scans taking a long time - depends on how big your disk is, and also whether you are scanning the whole disk (if so, the "calculating" step is fast) or a bunch of specific folders (then the "calculating" step can be slower - I know it sounds odd but its true). Also, I would suggest running version 9 - it resolves a few issues related to the scan progress being updated correctly in the user interface (the scan would run in the background, but the user interface gets out of synch).

Hope that helps.