StuffIt 12 conflicts with Norton AntiVirus

Update: We've now received the following note from Smith Micro regarding this issue:

"This problem was brought to our attention this morning and our engineers are already working on fixing the problem. As soon as we have a fix for the problem, it will be made available to customers, but there is currently no information on when it will be available.

"If you have an earlier version of StuffIt, I might recommend that you uninstall StuffIt Deluxe 12 and revert back to the older version, for the time-being. I don't recall any issue like this occuring when StuffIt 11 was released."

As mentioned below, you might want to consider leaving StuffIt Deluxe 12 uninstalled altogether and leaving only StuffIt Expander intact.

---

Following the recent release of StuffIt 12, we've received several notes from readers observing that installing StuffIt affects Norton AntiVirus.

William writes:

I just installed Stuffit 12.0 and on restart I get the following re NAV - "Norton AV auto-protect could not load the scan engine - run live update (code 6)". I tried the update but it says I'm up to date.

I have had no problems with NAV prior to the installation of Stuffit 12.0. I re-installed NAV 10.0 and let it get the updates (18 megs) and on restart I still have the same problem.

I also disabled the Antivirus check in Stuffit and still same problem.

John says (in almost identical terms):

I just installed the full Stuffit 12.0 and now after rebooting Norton Antivirus Auto-Protect will not start with a Code 6. No workaround so far.

It's deja vu all over again. Something quite similar happened about a year and a half ago, following the release of StuffIt Expander 10.0.2. We reported at that time that Allume Systems, who were the developers of StuffIt in those days, explained this as due to a faulty installer. Apparently the installer for this version of StuffIt was deleting the contents of /Library/Frameworks/Stuffit.framework and /Library/Frameworks/StuffitSupport.framework, and other applications that rely on these frameworks to do their work were therefore stymied. And evidently Norton AntiVirus is such an application, possibly because it looks inside StuffIt archives to search for virus-infected files.

If that's the cause of the problem in this case as well, then possibly it could be solved simply by deleting those frameworks. If there are no StuffIt framework folders at all, Norton AntiVirus should presumably just shrug its shoulders and say to itself, "Okay, this user doesn't have StuffIt, so I won't be able to look inside StuffIt archives, and that's that." Whereas, if the StuffIt framework folders are present but empty, this would confuse Norton AntiVirus, which would try to load the frameworks and would fail. That's just a theory, but it's worth a go, until more information from Smith Micro (current StuffIt developers) is forthcoming.

Of course, at the same time we here at MacFixIt are left scratching our heads over the continued relevance of both these utilities in light of the troubleshooting issues they've caused. Having StuffIt 12 disable Norton AntiVirus seems a little like you can't get to work because your mammoth killed your mastodon. Dude, take the car! Mac OS X includes great compression methods, including File > Create Archive available directly in the Finder, and the StuffIt contextual menu has been repeatedly linked to Finder crashes. To check files for viruses (unlikely in the first place), you can use the free and non-intrusive ClamXav; Norton AntiVirus, on the other hand, has been a notorious cause of application crashes and conflicts over the years. Of these two outmoded utilities, the most you could possibly need would be the freeware StuffIt Expander, just in case some email attachment or download turns out to be stuffed with it; and in that case you should also be writing to the sender or developer asking them to stop using StuffIt. We all remember with nostalgia and gratitude the System 6 days when disk storage was tiny, downloading was slow, and StuffIt was the standard utility; and surely StuffIt should get some sort of Zombie award for managing to outlive by several years the reports of its death. But this is 2007, not 1987.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

Resources