Web content scanner woes

We have the exact same issue.

If we enable the sophos addin in IE8 (Windows 7) we get hanging picture loading and in the status bar the progess bar keeps on displaying: "1 item remaining".

If we disable it the hanging dissapears.

Good luck with that. I'm in the middle of another support case regarding the web scanner with Windows XP so I'm not keen to start another one just yet. If the solution is simple then please post it.

I also started experiencing this IE Hang behavior after installing Sophos during my evaluation.   I am running IE8 on Windows 7 x64.

My pre-sales contact at Sophos mentioned that this problem is being tracked internally as DEF# 52467 .  I asked Support for an update on this a few weeks ago and when they replied back they couldn't confirm if the problem will be resolved in the 9.5 release or not.

I have opened support incident #2308616 so that Support knows about another customer (me) who noticed this problem. :)

Hello to all having this problem

Do you have any publicly accessible URL where this behaviour shows? If so we could either reproduce the problem or enunciate the well-liked phrase but it works for me :smileywink:. Some of us have access to the 9.5 version and if the problem's still existent it'd be a good idea to report it for this version too.

Christian

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QC wrote:

Hello to all having this problem

Do you have any publicly accessible URL where this behaviour shows? If so we could either reproduce the problem or enunciate the well-liked phrase but it works for me :smileywink:. Some of us have access to the 9.5 version and if the problem's still existent it'd be a good idea to report it for this version too.

Christian

Hi QC,

Using IE8 in Windows 7, perform a Google search for a random topic.  From the results screen hold down the CTRL key and click on the first 5 or 10 results over the course 2-5 seconds in order to open the web pages in new tabs.    Randomly you will notice that one or more Tabs will not complete loading and that you will need to kill the iexplore.exe processes from Task Manager in order to unfreeze things.    

Then try to duplicate/repeat the above steps and randomly you will not experience the hang.

Just for information.  I tried this on my Windows 7 Pro (32-bit) without any problems.  I launched at least 20 new tabs from the search results.  All pages loaded in full.

Lenovo T61 - Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz  - 3GB RAM - SAV 9.0.5

Thanks,

Jak

Jak,

I don't know what to tell you, but I was able to reproduce this IE hang this morning again.  But it is very intermittent.  Just a reminder that the hang problems do stop if I unininstall Sophos.

I have two systems, a dual core T60 laptop running Win7 x86, and a quad core desktop running Win7 x64.   I do experience the hangs much more often on my desktop, so I wonder if the problem has a higher chance of occuring if there are more cores (either that or it is the fact that I use my desktop more often). 

My theory is that this hang has a random chance of occuring when a new iexplore.exe process is started, and that the chance increases with the number of CPU cores on the system.  A new process happens when first starting IE and also each time you open a new tab (with some exceptions).  If you close a tab without exiting completely out of IE then its iexplore.exe process hangs around for a while in case it can be reused for another new tab.  You have to completely exit IE in order for all iexplore.exe processes to exit.

So to increase the chance of a hang happening:
- Clear your temporary internet files- Verify that IE Protected Mode browsing is enabled (the default for IE 8 under Win7)- Completely exit out of IE- Then start IE and try to open some random links from the Internet in new tabs.  - If the hang doesn't happen, repeat from the beginning a few times until you hit it.

With the above said, my theory is that this problem may not be related to the Web Scanner after all.  I found the below excellent thread by JonKloske on Monday, and after making the changes recommended in the thread I have not experienced any more IE hangs (well, until this morning when I reverted the changes and was able to reproduce the hang).

/search?q= 3208

I have this same exact issue while attempting to access www.hotmail.com while the scanner is enabled. It gets stuck and will not move on. So I did something that I thought made sense; I contacted tech support via email. I described the issue and provided screen shots of what was happening. This is my correspondence with Sophos Tech Support:

I'm having an issue related to the Web Content Scanner. It is preventing some websites from loading. Hotmail fails every time and other websites tend to crash the browser. If I disable the scanner everything works fine. I've attempted to reinstall and I've disabled all other plugins in case of conflict, but nothing has worked.

System:

Windows 7 Pro 64bit

IE 8 32 bit (shown in images)

IE 8 64 bit (crashes)

AMD Phenom II X4 B95 Proc 3.00 GHz

4 GB RAM

Response:

The web scanner is going to slow sites from loading so that Sophos can scan scan all the content on the site before it loads. You can add sites to your local and trusted sites within your Internet Explorer settings that might help with the speed of these sites.

My Reply:

Slow... Slow I could understand. It never loads the page. It never goes beyond the point shown in the image I sent.

Sophos Reply:

Have you tried to enter in the sites in the trusted and local sites like I recommended?

My Reply: (Note: Sites shown below are malware sites)

Would this also be your advice if I said I wanted to go to here:

sensationgold.in/shop/seo.doc

or here:

ssjl.ru/backup.tgz

Sophos Reply:

I don't understand your question, if you are using the web content filtering part of Sophos and you want to sacrifice security for performance and speed then adding things to the trusted sites is going to do that.

Apparently this tech couldn't get my point that the website should either work or Sophos should be throwing up an alert stating that it's a bad site not stalling half way through the page, locking up the browser, or completely crashing it. I would've thought that my first email would've given a clue that A) I don't want to run around on the web without scanning working and B) Searching for conflicts with the plugin prior to contacting support may indicate that I work in the IT business. Ahhh. What do I know. They're the experts. Fortunately I decide what our company uses for security and more fortunate than that I didn't fax in my renewal for the quote that I received today.

Hello Jcorbett

I am sorry you have had a poor support experience, would you mind PM'ing me the case reference and I can see if I can help resolve this matter or if you prefer contact your account manager who will do their best to assist you.