I built Firefox on my machine last night which I've done a few times in the past. In the past I had no problems running my build, but the build I built last night ran extremely slowly (I'm talking 10 minutes for the window to come up). Since I don't have any problems running then nightly builds I download from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/, I thought the build was bad so I rebuilt, but the same thing happened. I transferred that build to another machine and it ran fine.
At that point I tried disabled Norton AV auto-protection and the issue went away and Firefox loaded up like normal. I decided to look in Procmon to see what the difference is between my build with NIS 2009 enabled, the official nightly build wth NIS 2009 enabled and my build with NIS 2009 disabled.
The only difference I could see what that with Norton enabled, right after Norton does something with ccGEvt.dll, Firefox tries to do a createFile on itself and the closes the file. This causes Firefox to hang for 30 seconds. This doesn't happen with my build with NIS 2009 disabled and doesn't happen period with the nightly build.
45277 12:35:08.0863772 PM ccSvcHst.exe 660 CreateFile C:\Program Files\Norton Internet Security\Engine\16.5.0.135\ccGEvt.dll SUCCESS Desired Access: Generic Read, Disposition: Open, Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Non-Directory File, Attributes: N, ShareMode: Read, AllocationSize: n/a, OpenResult: Opened
45278 12:35:08.0870072 PM ccSvcHst.exe 660 CloseFile C:\Program Files\Norton Internet Security\Engine\16.5.0.135\ccGEvt.dll SUCCESS
45279 12:35:08.0891563 PM firefox.exe 892 CreateFile E:\mozilla-central\obj-i686-pc-mingw32\dist\bin\firefox.exe SUCCESS Desired Access: Read Attributes, Synchronize, Disposition: Open, Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Non-Directory File, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Write, Delete, AllocationSize: n/a, OpenResult: Opened
45280 12:35:08.0892653 PM firefox.exe 892 CloseFile E:\mozilla-central\obj-i686-pc-mingw32\dist\bin\firefox.exe SUCCESS
This continues to happen periodically where Firefox tries to create the firefox.exe exec and then hangs. I have no idea why this happens on my home PC with NIS 2009 enabled. Like I said I ran it on my work PC (with Mcafee) and did not see this problem.
It doesn't matter if I exclude Firefox executable directory or not. The only work around is to disable A/V auto-protect.
Since I want to actually test a fix for another issue I'm seeing between Firefox and Norton, I kind of need A/V enabled to test, but I can't do that.
Anyone have a clue as to what's going on here?
Edit - I don't have to completely disable A/V protection. If I turned of SONAR Advanced Protection everything works fine.
If anyone at Symantec wants to look at this, I'll upload my Firefox (Minefield) build (it's only 7 MB compressed).