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

JonKloske

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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  • 0

    I upgraded to SAV 9.5, and still saw the IE hangs -- just not as often.

    I called Sophos Tech Support back and they suggested that I remove the Sophos entry in the AppInit_DLLs registry key.  They said that they should have a real fix ready early next year.

    It took APNick's information about the DetourDLLState key to make this fix more permanent. Otherwise the AppInit_DLLs entry would reappear every once in a while. (How often does Sophos release updates that re-create that key? Once a month?)

    :5474
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  • 0

    I upgraded to SAV 9.5, and still saw the IE hangs -- just not as often.

    I called Sophos Tech Support back and they suggested that I remove the Sophos entry in the AppInit_DLLs registry key.  They said that they should have a real fix ready early next year.

    It took APNick's information about the DetourDLLState key to make this fix more permanent. Otherwise the AppInit_DLLs entry would reappear every once in a while. (How often does Sophos release updates that re-create that key? Once a month?)

    :5474
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