StuffIt 12 conflicts with Norton AntiVirus (#2): Smith Micro issues a patch

Hard upon the heels of our report that StuffIt 12 conflicts with Norton AntiVirus, it appears that Smith Micro, the current developers of StuffIt, have scurried around after the fact to fix the problem, and have quickly released a patch.

Reader George reports receiving the following communication from Smith Micro:

It appears that we have found the root of the conflict between StuffIt 12 and Norton Antivirus, and have developed a fix for it. If you click on the following link, it will download a StuffIt file to your Mac. Inside is a readme file with information about the problem, and a small updater which will fix the problem - restoring full functionality to Norton Antivirus and allowing StuffIt 12 to work, as well. Please try the updater and let me know how it works for you.

Here is the link for the patch.

Also, we have found a fix for the problem with DropStuff not launching. All you should have to do is go to your home folder, then to Library/Preferences (in your home folder) and delete the file named com.stuffit.DropStuff.plist. After that, just restart your Mac, and DropStuff should work fine.

George goes on to report a couple of slight glitches in the procedure: (a) the file com.stuffit.DropStuff.plist was not where Smith Micro said it was, and (b) applying the patch and then deleting the plist file caused the patch to be overridden, requiring that it be applied a second time:

It looks like this solved both problems for me, but I found that the sequence of applying the corrections seems to be important. I applied the downloaded patch fix then deleted com.stuffit.DropStuff.plist (from /Library/Preferences not from ~/Library/Preferences by the way). When DropStuff was launched, the registration dialog appeared again. Submitting the registration information this time created a new com.stuffit.DropStuff.plist file and corrected the DropStuff problem whereby the registration dialog appeared every time I launched DropStuff. The files installed while submitting the registration information appeared to override the patch. I had to reapply the patch and both problems now appear to be fixed. Norton Antivirus seems to work fine now.

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