I recently bought new HP EliteBooks with Windows 7 Professional. they have Norton 2010 version 17.6.0.32 installed on them. These machines are part of a peer to peer network. The "server" machine is also a Windows 7 Professional machine. One of the main programs I use in my line of work will not run if Norton is running.
This program is installed to the server machine to a mapped network drive. In order to set it up at the workstations, I run a workstation setup program that creates an icon group, updates the registry on my workstation, installs some .dll files to Windows\System32, and installs MSXML and .Net if needed. This workstation setup program is ran from the mapped network drive. It is an .exe file that has it's own installation method, it doesn't use InstallShield or anything like that. When I try to run it, it starts to run and then freezes up. It seems to freeze at the time it creates the icon group on my desktop which is before it does everything else I mention that it does above. Since Norton doesn't let me turn the service off , I have to boot into Safe Mode for the Norton service to be disabled. Then I can run this other program. I have also tested this by uninstalling Norton from my workstation and running and it also works.
In Norton I have turned off Tamper Protection (I have seen it cause similar issues thoughout the years), excluded the network drive from real-time scanning, and even excluded the .exe file itself. None of this worked. At this point I am stuck having to boot my computer in Safe Mode in order for this other program to completely function.
I have also tested this program by installing it locally. It works just fine when running off of the local drive on my computer. The problem is that it has to be installed on the server for all the users/workstations to access it and it's database. On the server I have the same problem when running the application from a mapped network drive. If I disconnect the mapped network drive and use the substitue command from the DOS prompt to create the drive so Windows views it as a local drive instead of a network drive, the application runs.
It seems to be an issue of how Norton is viewing this program's files running across a mapped network drive since it lets the same files run when running from a local drive.
I noticed in the Security History in Norton there was a Community Watch Feedback entry that listed this .exe file but the Severity is "Info", the Status is "Pending", and the Recommended Action is "No Action Required." Does this mean that Norton stopped this file from running?
Is there a way in Norton AV to tell it to let various files run from a Network drive other than setting the real-time exclusions since that didn't fix my problem? If not is there something else I can do?