Spyware Doctor with Antivirus and Thunderbird

[nedsram]

I have just updated to v5.0 with antivirus enabled. I use Thunderbird to send email. Or rather I did. Now whenever I attempt to send a message Spyware Doctor flags a "file access" threat and resets the connection. I have tried to report a "False Positive", but there is no log file to append. (The folder is log not logs, and is empty anyway.) Of course in order to report the problem I had to disable the Antivirus "feature", and it will have to remain disabled until this problem is sorted.

A second problem is that all sent messages are getting the following appended five times, even with antivirus disabled:

E-mail message checked by PC Tools Spyware Doctor (5.0.0.169)
Database version: 5.06871
http://www.pctools.com/spyware-doctor/

A third problem - not directly related to email - is that the PC now locks solid at random intervals for up to 10 seconds. (XP Home, SP2).

I have long been a fan of Spyware Doctor, but this new version is something of a disaster - for me at least.

[trevor]

I use the same and found things slowed down a lot. If you disable the file guard I found this worked

[nedsram]

I use the same and found things slowed down a lot. If you disable the file guard I found this worked
Thanks I'll try that. But at this rate I could end up disabling half of the damned thing! :)

[luftx]

Heck, I was managing to thumble through with it with the A/V and email scanning turned off till today's update. Now I had to just disable all of it, 'cause it won't let me out on the network/internet, but I can get access to it inbound (I work on my box remotely alot).

[nedsram]

It gets worse for me too. 30 minutes ago it suddenly rebooted for no reason. Then I got the "Windows has recovered from a serious error" message reported in other threads. :mad: Last time this happened was when I told Ashampoo WinOptimiser to delete empty folders "to save space" - something I've never since tried. I wonder if Spyware Doctor has been trying to delete system folders?

[nedsram]

I've now also disabled file guard and email guard. It appears that the latter could be messing up incoming text mails so that they appear with no text body and a "phantom" attachment. However I can't be certain about this, as I don't know what the headers looked like before PC Tools Mime Parser messed with them. Here's an example of a mangled message; note that "Subject:" appears twice, and the second one does show up:

Received: (qmail 22437 invoked by uid 48); 21 Mar 2007 09:19:17 -0800
Date: 21 Mar 2007 09:19:17 -0800
Message-ID: <20070321171917.22435.qmail@somewhere.org>
To: me@somewhere.org
Subject:
From: Somebody <no_reply@somewhere.org>
Subject: The Subject
Content-Type:
Content-Disposition:
Content-Transfer-Encoding:
X-PCToolsMIME: Updated by PC Tools Mime Parser 1.0.0.4
X-PCToolsMIME: Updated by PC Tools Mime Parser 1.0.0.4

Content-type: text/plain;

MIME-Version: 1.0

<<Text>> [Does not appear but an attachment named "Attachment" appears. Attempting to open it fails.]

On the other hand this one displayed correctly:

Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:44:39 GMT
To: me@somewhere.org
Subject: Reply to post 'Spyware Doctor with Antivirus and Thunderbird'
From: "PC Tools Community Forum" <achen@pctools.com>
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
Message-ID: <200703211637.3c9e9c951529@www.pctools.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP
Content-Disposition:
X-PCToolsMIME: Updated by PC Tools Mime Parser 1.0.0.4
X-PCToolsMIME: Updated by PC Tools Mime Parser 1.0.0.4

<<Text>> [Displays correctly]

[Support]

Hi nedsram,

Thanks for your report, I'm sure they are currently investigating this issue. I will pass this on to our Technical Support so that they'll be able to assist you better.

Cheers,

PC Tools Support

[nedsram]

In the original post I said that the "checked for viruses" message appeared five times. In fact it is added twice for outgoing email and twice for incoming email. Somehow I managed to send myself a test message (but most were killed off) and that's why I saw four of them. It should be two though . :)

[brickyard1911]

Here's a question for everyone. Before the Spyware Doctor 5.0 release I was running 4.0 and separately was running PC Tools AntiVirus. When I went to download the 5.0 upgrade to Spyware Doctor I was prompted to download Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus instead as it detected the PC Tools AntiVirus on my system. I now have Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus running (with all OnGuard functions except email scanning disabled). PC Tools AntiVirus is also still running on my system separately. I was never prompted to disable it or remove it from my system. I would think that is the new Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus was meant to combine the two previously separate programs that the install would have taken care of this for me. ??????????????????????

Does anybody know if I should disable or completely remove the PC Tools AntiVirus? If so, am I protected like before? My computer seems to have stabilized since disabling most of the OnGuard functions but 5.0 still seems to be a mess.

[nedsram]

I have just added thunderbird to the OnGuard exclusions list. This seems to have fixed the "false positive" issue. Moving all of the exclusions to a single list is not very intuitive though. You can only specify extensions not individual files in the (separate) antivirus exclusions.

Now it says "Attention required: New version available". But when it's clicked on, smart update is not finding any new updates. Maybe the program is clairvoyant. :)