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Sophos 9's Buffer Overflow Protection System (BOPS) and Internet Explorer 8

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed any odd behavior of Internet Explorer since upgrading from Sophos 7 to Sophos 9?

We've found that on a substantial portion of our machines (Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and possibly even Windows 7) suffer from a reproducible but statistical-in-nature deadlock in Internet Explorer.

I originally reported the problem on Microsoft's Technet forums (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpronetworking/thread/ef0a7af9-26b9-45b5-a05e-0cfd88c42aee) however it soon became clear that the culprit was Sophos_detoured.dll, part of the BOPS in Sophos 9 (and the timeline of the problem occurred very shortly after upgrading substantial portions of our machines to Sophos 9 from the original Sophos 7 clients they had installed.)

I notice someone else on the MS forums said they had the same problem, so I thought I'd post this here to achieve two things:

1. If other people experience this problem, they may know what's causing it instead of tearing their hair out about it

and

2. Perhaps other people have suggestions or advice

I should point out that we have an open ticket with Sophos about this at the moment [#2345512], and I've discovered at least two workarounds (which are both effectively the same workaround from different directions), so I'm not necessarily after assistance, just healthy discussion and information sharing.

As an aside, after I posted about this issue in a similar way on our internal forums, another IT staff member from a completely unrelated area responded along the lines of "Ahhh! That's what's causing it! We've just been reformatting and re-installing windows since we were stumped by the problems, and we never connected it with the recent upgrade to 9!"

And finally, the easiest workaround to the problem is to disable BOPS and reboot. There's a reghack that achieves effectively the same thing involving the AppInit_DLLs key (see the referenced microsoft forum post for details if you're brave.)

Cheers,

Jon.

:3208


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Parents
  • Related issue possibly:

    IE8, Windows 2003 SP2, Citrix Presentation Server, Sophos 9.0.5.

    Setting the homepage on any user (Citrix or not) to our local intranet page, the page will not load when IE8 loads. Hitting "Refresh" once IE8 is up will load the page instantly. After spending a long, long time trawling around I found this thread and discovered that either disabling Sophos Web Content Scanner add-in OR removing the Sophos entry from the AppInit_DLLs registry key will make the problem go away. This problem can be reproduced 100% of the time on this server.

    (We also have intermittent hanging issues with IE7 on two other Citrix servers, ongoing for months, which I am now thinking may be related to this issue too - although this is un-tested. That issue is about 2-3% of the time IE7 will hang while loading.)

    :3882
Reply
  • Related issue possibly:

    IE8, Windows 2003 SP2, Citrix Presentation Server, Sophos 9.0.5.

    Setting the homepage on any user (Citrix or not) to our local intranet page, the page will not load when IE8 loads. Hitting "Refresh" once IE8 is up will load the page instantly. After spending a long, long time trawling around I found this thread and discovered that either disabling Sophos Web Content Scanner add-in OR removing the Sophos entry from the AppInit_DLLs registry key will make the problem go away. This problem can be reproduced 100% of the time on this server.

    (We also have intermittent hanging issues with IE7 on two other Citrix servers, ongoing for months, which I am now thinking may be related to this issue too - although this is un-tested. That issue is about 2-3% of the time IE7 will hang while loading.)

    :3882
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