Windows 7, Anti-Virus and IE8

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Windows 7 is a new operating system from MicroSoft. It's a real whizbang and maybe the best OS out of MS in years, but....

Because it is a big advance, it can cause problems with some programs written for older versions of Windows. In particular, people are getting false positives from their AntiVirus software in some situations. A few people have run into this on BigCloset who are running the combination of W7, AVG and IE8. There may be other combinations of anti-virus and browser that will produce a similar effect.

There are no viruses on BC. If you're worried about ads, you can go into your preferences and turn off the ads assuming you have an account.

What's seems to be giving the false positives is W7 tricking some of the subroutines in IE into treating W7 just like Vista. AVG detects this trick as being indicative of spyware which it reports as a possible virus. That's a huge simplification and may not be the actual mechanism but is most likely at least parallel to what is going on.

This is probably a temporary problem. MS will fix either W7 or IE to avoid this or AVG will get smarter about just what is going on.

Hugs,
Erin

Anti virus

I don't expect to "upgrade" to IE8 or win7 until I absolutely have to. I do intend to give them time to work out as many bugs as possible before I have to. Quite a bit of my equipment will not work with win7, and I choose not to run out and buy new just to have their latest whiztoy. If you have questions about the above, you can go to their website and download a small test that will tell you if your equipment and/or programs will function with win7, as not all will. They also have an anti-virus program now, that you can download if you have a valid copy of win on your system. Since we all know that ms would not issue a program that will not function with their other programs, (oops I forgot Office 2007 which will not function with earlier versions w/o a translator program from them) it may clear up bad interactions with other suppliers software. edit...win7 can also emulate xp if you wish it to, and that may also cause similar problems, but I have no info on that at all. just a guess on my part. Windoze was getting very picky about what programs it would allow to function or interact with it for quite a while. That was blocked very slowly by some intervention, and it became more outsider friendly for a while. From what little I have seen here, and at www.kommando.com, and word of mouth, it may be moving back to unfriendly to outsiders in the interests of making itself run better. But they can't get crazy since there are so many outside providers now.

re: Win7 and viruse alert

Hi

I doubt this is an IE8 or Windows 7 issue, but more likely to be an overzealous AVG. I have been on BC on several Windows 7 machines, with different anti-virus programs and have had no issues. The machines have MS Security Essentials (free) and McAfee anti-virus(paid).

Karen

It is an AVG problem

I ran the Win 7 beta for a time with AVG and there were a few different things that caused false positives, including the new MMORPG Aion. I'm sure AVG will get it fixed in a future release. To this point I haven't heard of any other anti-virus causing this problem.

No issues for me

so far, but then again I haven't used IE as my internet browser since I was last using my parents' computer all the time.

As far as the questions on Windows 7 -- I like it. It's a lot smoother running and more friendly than Vista was, requires less RAM, and has BETTER compatibility with the older programs I wanna run than Vista did. That's not to say that I won't find things that make me mad at it later, and the fact that I'm running 32 bit rather than 64 might, from what I've been told by friends running the 64 bit version, be the reason I'm having less compatibility issues, but so far it's been good to me.

Melanie E.