Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[rameshiyer]

Hi,

Though Microsoft website lists this problem while opening any Word document since Sep'11, I have noticed this only after i upgraded to the latest version of my NIS 2012, i.e. 19.5.0.145 about a week ago. The Microsoft support bulletin at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/891986 mentions that the file "Officeav.dll" of Norton Antivirus Office Plug-in may be corrupt or outdated. They suggest renaming the file and then restarting the Word program. I am not comfortable doing this as this may impact NIS's auto-scan of Office documents feature. Moreover, this suggestion should be corroborated by Norton team, as the MS site post is fairly old hence may not address the cause for those of us who have only recently started getting the error.

Hope Norton IS Team resolves this soon, as it is quite annoying to get the error whenever I open a Word document. Also, the error appears only before the first Word Document is opened, not while opening subsequent files during the same session.

I use MS-Office 2007 Professional, but I understand that this issue is related to Word 2003 as well.

Regards,

Ramesh

[TBear2012]

Hi, tried downloading Trusteer Rapport, trouble !

Word docs giving message 'can't perform....dialog box open' .

I uninstalled Rapport (working fine with Norton Internet  Security on my PC by the way.

Took advice from this forum, switched off Office Auto Scan, Word docs came good.

So I deleted officeav.dll, all working fine, so I switched on office scan again, all fine.

I ran a check on Norton, one item could not be fixed, so I ran Norton uninstall and reinstall.

Unfortunately, with the new installation, the problem came back, so I'm running with office scan disabled, but obviously would like all working properly. Can anyone tell me the answer? Thanks in advanc!

[SendOfJive Norton Fighter]

Hi TBear2012,

The Word issue is a bug that was introduced in the 19.5 update.  It is being investigated and your best course to follow until a fix is released is to continue to work around the issue by disabling the Office Automatic Scan.  This has no negative impact on your security, since all files are scrutinized by Auto-Protect on access, anyway.  Trusteer Rapport is known to sometimes cause some system and program compatibility problems, but this isn't one of them

[jwc93061]

Hi !

I had same problem here. I had no problems with this issue in 19.2.0.10 and earlier versions. What I tried, and it is working for now is to turn off "product tamper protection" in General settings. Then rename OfficeAV.dll (ver19.5.0.145) (in my case I called it "officeav.dll.145").

Then from my backup archive I brought back a copy of OfficeAV.dll (ver19.2.0.10). I copied it into the "engine/19.5.0.145 directory and turned on tamper protection.

I rebooted and tried the open a Word.docx DID NOT receive any errors. I've been running this way for about a week with no problems. 

Just a thought. --JW

[cj_graham]

I also had success eliminating the error message by setting NIS options to disable MS Office Automatic Scans.  This begs the question: When this issue is fixed, will we be notified to re-enable auto MS Office Automatic Scans?  If so, how?

Thanks,

Cliff

[needhelp2234 Contributor]

Well you can manually run LiveUpdate from time to time and if there is an unusually large update or if the update lists something on the lines of NIS Engine Update, turn the feature back on and test it.  Or you can check back to the forum as surely somebody will post the "all OK" signal as soon as the problem is fixed.

I would NOT recommend re-naming the file or restoring the file to an older version as it may corrupt your Norton software.  Just LEAVE FILE ALONE!  Instead, if you can't stand the pop-up, turn off Microsoft Office scanning as Tim Lopez told.

[TBear2012]

Thanks for that, I was going to rebuild the laptop (recover I mean!) but hesitated at all the extra work! I'll do as you say and work around it.

 Funny thing is it affected Word 2003 on my Laptop, but my old PC with XP pro and Word 2002 (on Office pro), and running Rapport,  is not affected.

The only other problem that has happened is that when I try to copy Word docs across from PC to Laptop it can't access the files, but I can open the PC files via the laptop, just can't copy across, so, I have to copy to Sandisk, then copy on to the Laptop, which is a pain! Any ideas?

Will Norton tell us when this (bug?) is fixed?

[Tim_Lopez Administrator]

All,

We will post here when this issue is addressed. However, we don't have a timeframe for when we'll be able to post the patch to address this issue.

Some of you have said that you think it's bad that we suggest disabling a security feature. I definitely understand where you're coming from. However, i must again remind that this feature is actually disabled by default on all new installations. We have the feature there for that people who have used this scan in the past don't feel like we're taking out valuable features. In reality, a lot of new features we've introduced cover what this feature does, and more! SONAR and enhancements to AutoProtect and IPS scanning can cover the bases with much more strength. So, you shouldn't feel like you're less secure if you turn this feature off. Fact is, you're secure no matter if you turn this feature on or off. 

Again, we have posted a workaround in THIS POST, and we will update this thread when those who continue to utilize this feature can turn it on without seeing this error occur. 

Sorry for the trouble, and thanks for your patience! 

[rameshiyer]

Thanks for your reassuring post Mr. Lopez. As you have mentioned, this feature (Microsoft Office Automatic scan) is turned off by default as there are other features of NIS which take care of this requirement. Hence, have turned off the MSO Auto-scan. Shall await your (from Norton Team) post on resolution for this issue with MS-Word.

[The_Hulk]

What has Symantec done for the damage to my normal.dot document? I did not have a copy and because I thought Word was the cause of the message/error, I have deleted the normal.dot etc. etc. This was a disaster. I have thousands of Word-documents and I have all to reset by a blunder from Symantec. I read that the issue was known for a long time and no warning from Symantec! It's a disaster. I worked on thousands of Word-documents and it is ruined. All the settings are gone.