Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[elsewhere]

---

delphinium wrote:

[...]

Manually running the idle time scan is exactly the same as clicking "scan now."

[...]

---

Hi delphinium

Initially, I had the same expectation as you but when the manual Idle Full System Scan finished, it displayed the little 'Idle Time Scan has finished' pop-up above the clock in the system notification area. That's what made me decide to pursue this further.

---

 [...]

...also, I swear I did not interrupt the thing.  It was unmolested throughout.  I think Bombastus might perhaps have the best idea, that if liveupdate runs during the idle time scan, it bungs up the works.I will try it both ways with liveupdate turned off and again with it on to see if there is any change.

Symantec doesn't seem to find this topic interesting, so I imagine they are aware of it.

---

I believe you when you say you didn't interrupt it; the 'user resuming work' mentioned earlier  was just an example to highlight that any interruption to the Idle Scan will cause the issue. The Idle scan could be interrupted by LiveUpdate, or a Windows process like a screensaver, or even the mysterious Norton process that runs every 30 minutes, even during Silent Mode as shown below:

 At the end of the day, though, I think that we've established that any interruption to the Idle Full System Scan causes incorrect file counts to be reported when this scan completes.

As for Symantec doing something about it, I have the Norton 360 V5 beta installed on another computer. If this bug exists there, then I'll report it. Given that both NIS and N360 are based on the same engine, if the bug gets fixed there, then the fix should flow through into NIS 2011 in the next product maintenance release.

[delphinium Norton Fighter]

I love that screen shot.  I don't remember ever seeing that before. The scan count problem was actually complained abou through much of 2010.  It will interesting to see if there is an improvement in the beta.

[AllenM Norton Fighter · Accepted solution]

Hi Delph,

Symantec has confirmed a problem with file counts, etc during scans. They have indicated this is fixed in the recent public BETA builds of N360v5 and will be rolled into an update to NAV and NIS at some point.

The date of release for any fix is not known at this time but at least Symantec appears to have resolved at least one issue in this area.

Best wishes.

Allen

[delphinium Norton Fighter]

Thank you so much for that news AllenM.  That info pleases me to no end.