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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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  • I am experiening Internet explorer 8 freezing on a bunch of computers here, usually when the user first runs IE8, pretty much as discribed in the orginal post.

    Did sophos give any indication when the beta fix would be rolled into the main product? In the meantime I'll give the registry fixes above a shot and see how I get on.

    I'm not entirely sure it's the same issue but I want to rule it out before I investigate further. 

    :6153
Reply
  • I am experiening Internet explorer 8 freezing on a bunch of computers here, usually when the user first runs IE8, pretty much as discribed in the orginal post.

    Did sophos give any indication when the beta fix would be rolled into the main product? In the meantime I'll give the registry fixes above a shot and see how I get on.

    I'm not entirely sure it's the same issue but I want to rule it out before I investigate further. 

    :6153
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