kerrie

Hi again, Planet. Thanks so much for being so patient. And lucky me, to get an unprecedented problem! (Series of problems, actually). I will do as you suggest but I think it is going to have to be after Christmas now. And just for the record, I didn't change any default settings before I started having problems. I only started changing things to try and sort out the problems. Maybe something went astray in the installation so I will reinstall it, after using the Norton removal tool (which I'm assuming checks for things left behind with the uninstaller. But now that i have allowed so many rules it is no longer (so far) interfering with my internet connection or interfering with programs phoning home, even with automatic firewall setting. Main problem is I don't trust it to be protecting my machine the way it should. I am about to kick off the deep scan to see what happens with that and will spend more time with it when i get a chance. Thanks again, Kerrie

Thank you Peter and Planet very much for your replies! I hope I am going to have time to deal with them, but part of my problem is I am so busy that I just wanted an antivirus/firewall that supposedly was better integrated with/designed for Mac OS so that I can 'just quickly' do stuff on my laptop! (as apparently the reviews I read had found. I now wonder if those reviews were v5 rather than v6…...) and currently I have to factor in the possibility that I have to deal with some ESET generated problem just to do normal things. So I may not get time to pursue this further until after Christmas/New year. Before I switched from Norton, I used the uninstaller to get rid of Norton, so I am not trying to use both at once. And in any case, the demo version of ESET worked fine for the trial month. It is a bit of a rip-off if you are not really trialling the thing you are about to purchase when you think you are. Regarding the wifi setup, I used whatever the mac default method (in OSX 10.8.5) is to connect via wifi to our home modem, so if that is Airport then I take your word for it. But I don't actually think that connecting to the home modem via wifi is the problem because I was able to print a document at the same time that Safari was not connecting to the internet. (by that I mean that refreshing the google home screen in safari came up with a grey mac screen stating that i did not have internet connection, and no other websites were opening either) so it took me a while to figure out it might have been ESET. I thought at first that there was something wrong with the ADSL2 connection external to the modem. But the problem was corrected as soon as I unchecked the red block on the ESET 'public' wifi rule! (My macbook pro talks, via wifi and the netgear home modem, to our printer, which runs off our home desktop PC which runs windows7.) As to whether I would have cancelled a query to define the home wifi as ‘home’ zone, I am almost certain I would have taken the opportunity to define it as ‘home’ and not dismissed, but I cant actually remember at what point in the procedings I was given the question to define it as ‘home’ zone, so I cant be absolutely certain, but I do remember defining it as ‘home’ at some point, when prompted. And when I was trying to figure out what was getting blocked I saw a screen under Firewall that stated "Profiles used on Network Interfaces / WiFi: Home " Which then prompted me to find the rules and as I poked around and discovered the other zones for ‘public’ and ‘work’ I noted that there were no red blocked rules for either ‘home’ nor ‘work’ but there was one rule blocked for ‘public’ and that just happened to have the same name as the event in the log that was denied. So when I unchecked the box that selected that rule, the internet was immediately restored. This made me suspicious and I wondered whether there was some secret wifi connection going on that I was unaware of, but you would know whether that is possible better than me. I have never logged into any of our neighbors wifi if ever it has popped up as visible. I have logged into relatives wifi when I’ve visited them, but that was when I still had Norton and I defined those as ‘travelling’ or something similar. I forget what choices were available in Norton. Anyway, currently I have allowed as new ‘home’ rules quite a lot of connections in and out and I followed your advice and put it back on automatic. Now it seems to be not preventing me from accessing the internet anymore and it seems to not be hanging itself trying to update through a blocked connection any more. So it is annoying that I had to go through that process, but it might have resolved whatever the essential thing was that everything else was log-jammed up behind. The main problem now is that even though the smart scan I kicked off yesterday says it was completed, if I open up the log, it didn’t scan very many files compared even to previous interrupted scans (although they were probably deep scans??) and there is a long list of files there that all have a [4] at the end indicating that “Object cannot be opened. It may be in use by another application or operating system.” The trouble with that is that I deliberately closed all my open apps and kicked that scan off when I didn’t need to use the computer and some of the files are for things like Canon scan and Preview and other software that I know definitely wasn’t open at the time. I have needed to use my computer so I haven’t done it yet, but I will kick off a deep scan tonight with automatic setting instead of interactive and see if that works. I am choosing ‘Macintosh HD’ for that and unchecking the 'Mobile Backups' (I don't have a backup disk connected. I only connect it when I do an actual backup about once a month, using time machine). By the way, for the in depth scan i go through custom scan and chose 'local drive' from the drop down and then check the box for Macintosh HD and uncheck the box for 'mobile backups'. Is that what I should be doing? I have a guest account on the laptop so I want everything scanned, not just stuff on my profile. Also, ESET has crashed a couple of times when I’ve been trying to open log files (so the icon disappears from the top menu bar altogether.) So I have restarted my computer to get it open again, or just directly opened the app in the applications folder. I haven’t reproduced the error preventing me saving a MS Word document to a subfolder again, though. If I do uninstall ESET and fresh install, will it forget all the rules I’ve now allowed for ‘home’ profile and will I have to go through all of that again? ie put it on interactive until all my apps have had a chance to phone home and be manually ‘allowed’ before putting it onto auto again so that it can complete a scan without interrupting for an approval? Also, will I need a new key to open or authenticate it or anything? If I get the chance I will figure out if I can generate a logfile the way you suggest, Peter, if another major problem happens. So far I have downloaded it but I haven’t run it. I’m presuming it will prompt me with what to do because I have no idea otherwise? Anyway thanks for your help thus far. I am pretty disappointed that this is so difficult for a dunce like me. At least Norton worked and custom settings were understandable, even if it did slow my machine down. Kerrie

I recently switched from Norton to ESET, ironically on the basis of a couple of reviews I read which said ESET was better integrated into mac than other security software and worked more silently!! (Norton was slowing down my machine too much). How wrong i was!! I tried the month long trial version and all was well, so I paid the subscription and Ive been having problems ever since. I am not computer savvy so I don't know what most of the jargon on these forums means, but basically ESET has done a few things which have made my computer useless unless I disable ESET. Firstly the default settings did not have 'interactive' set for the firewall. So the software kept freezing and not letting me connect to the internet. I think ESET was also trying to update definitions or something while simultaneously locking me (and itself!) out of the internet!! But I couldn't find anything within the ESET software telling me what process it was going through to tell me what had hung (just knew something was happening because the wheel at the top menu bar was spinning). I had to kill ESET (which was using 100% CPU) in Activity monitor. When I looked at the firewall log there were dozens and dozens of entries for that day saying 'communication denied by rule' and the rule was 'Deny Airport Base Station discovery. When I went stumbling around further I discovered that although i was using my home wifi which i had defined as 'home' in ESET firewall and the 'home' rules did not block anything, there was a red rule (for both in and out) in the 'public' profile entitled 'Deny Airport Base Station Discovery'. So i unchecked that box within the rules for the public profile and suddenly safari could connect to the internet again!!! But why would this be the case if I was not using a public wifi, (and have never used public wifi, in fact), and since i installed ESET I had only ever used my home wifi, which I had defined in ESET as 'home' profile. I emailed ESET and they sent me a link to the manual. Nothing to specifically address the issue. In any case i thought I had solved the issue, but no. My computer continued to seize up. After stumbling around I discovered there was an interactive mode on the firewall so I have been 'allowing' everything that has popped up as a 'saved rule' for the 'home' profile. Some of them turn out to be things like Dropbox trying to synch, or other apparent mac core processes, and one adobe updater. But in so doing, ESET seizes up until I respond to the popup so an in-depth scan i kicked off overnight stopped 1/4 way in after another mac process tried to access the internet and as I was not there to OK it, everything stopped happening. Currently, to cut an even longer story short, I am at the point where if i want to use the internet I have to turn off all scheduled scans, and disable the ESET options for Real Time File System Protection and Network traffic filtering, in order to turn on my computer, have other software respond, (such as microsoft excel or word) or connect to the internet in safari. So basically, I can't surf the web AND have web protection on at the same time, and i can't have scheduled scans unless i want them to prevent me using anything else while they are on and they take a long time to get through. As a computer illiterate who only knows enough to be dangerous, I just want the defaults to work. Obviously this cannot be the case for ESET. SO can anyone tell me what settings I need to turn on or off in ESET to get the thing to BOTH protect me AND allow me to surf the internet in Safari? Unless, of course, any of you think my being blocked off the internet in safari has anything to do with the bugs you are describing in this thread? I have a macbook pro with OSX 10.8.5 and the version of ESET that came when I subscribed is 6.0.14.0 Thanks PS I just tried to save an MS word document to a subfolder and couldn't. I could only save it to the parent document folder. So I turned off a process called something like eset deamon os something and voila! I can now save my word document to the subfolder again. So even though I had disabled real time file system protection and network traffic filtering, it was somehow blocking me from saving my word document to subfolders. I really know nothing about computers but this sounds pretty dysfunctional to me. Norton, although it slowed my computer down it NEVER interfered with me actually USING my computer to do normal things.