My AV software is Norton. One of Norton's (sub?) programs - SONAR keeps detecting an error and tossing things into Quarantine as being suspicious. All of the entries read the same:
Category: Quarantine
Date & Time,Risk,Activity,Status,Recommended Action,Path - Filename
6/20/2011 1:06 AM,High,milkyway_separation_0.88_windows_intelx86.exe (milkyway_separation_0.88_windows_intelx86.exe) detected by SONAR,Quarantined,Resolved - No Action Required

SONAR detected this "threat" 18 times on 06.18.11 5 times on 06.19.11 and 3 times so far this morning.

Suggestions? TIA

Its a real pain - I empathise, it happens quite a lot with BOINC applications on quite a few Anti-V products. Its known as a "false positive" the characteristics and behaviour that Norton picks up from BOINC App(s) leads it to believe it found a nasty - it didnt, hence the phrase "false positive". There are two ways to stop it; tell Symantec so they exclude the app (you'll wait forever and a day, dont bother), or do the exclusion yourself in Nortons

Look inside Norton for the "exceptions" facility where you can exclude processes and/or directories and/or files. Explicitly exclude BOINC Directory and also each BOINC sub project directory, in the exclude from checking facility within Norton's. You will not get it again, ever, on any Project providing any new BOINC Project you join has its sub directory also added to exclusions. Only need do the Directory and Sub Directory levels, then any subsequent new application in a project (eg your 0.88) also gets covered automatically. A pain to start with, but its only a few minutes, after which it will not happen again.

That will mean you will not get any BOINC files checked by Norton's, but thats no bad thing, it does slow down BOINC processing, and you can be safely reassured BOINC Admins do not download viruses to you :)

Regards
Zy

I agree completely with Zydors reply, I used to have the same problem a few years ago when I ran Norton. Of all the AV programs around it seems particularly prevalent to this. It uses a system called advanced heuristic analysis which searches for programs exhibiting virus like behaviour, and errs on the safe side by assuming they are viruses and quarantining them.

As Zy says, you can manually exclude them within Norton itself, it's a bit of a pain, but a once-off job. To be fair, Norton is only doing what it is programmed to do, that is look for known viruses in its database and any other likely looking candidates.

I'm not knocking Norton at all, it's a great program and works well, but it is expensive and I found it a bit too heavyweight for me, as it did slow my computer down. And it's almost nigh impossible to completely uninstall it once you've set it up. Even Nortons own special uninstall utility doesn't often work. I now use a combination of AVG, Avast, and Adaware all of which are free.

And yes, neither Boinc or the projects download viruses!

Interesting thread. I have been using Norton for about 11 years now, on all my machines running BOINC. I've never had any BOINC files flagged, and I never set anything in Norton to allow this. I wonder what the difference is?

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Possibly not got SONAR enabled, or maybe the pre-set actions are set to ask/no action ? [hope its not "no action" - gulp :)] Its a user option to enable/disable. SONAR is a good facility, but it can get a bit too picky with predictions, and when it happens ... need the exceptions to stop a trip to the nuthouse :)

Regards
Zy

I didn't using Anit virus untill I went to Internet security and that flaged it.

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Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?
If it makes sense, DON'T do it.