This lunchtime I paid one of my occasional emergency visits to the Parish Office in order to sort out and IT problem. As is commonly the case, the problem was that the office computer could neither send or receive e-mail, although in this case it proved to be pretty simple to sort out, as a fuse had blown on the wireless router, so a quick rearrangement of the network cables allowed the office PC to see the outside world again.

However I found another problem, very reminiscent of a line from Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies where he instructs his staff to release software with lots of bugs in order to sell upgrades…

As usual, I let Outlook run through shifting all the e-mail that had been held up by the problem, and in doing this I noticed something slightly odd – almost every e-mail coming in was being flagged as spam by the copy of Norton Internet Security 2006 installed on the PC, indeed looking at the contents of the spam folder, it had been doing this for a couple of weeks. After redirecting all the incorrectly identified spam back into the in-box, I opened the Anti-Spam settings to see what the problem was, and was greeted by a series of Internet Explorer errors – despite being a desktop application it was using ASP to display the information.

So, the big question was, what had changed – there hadn’t been an update to Norton downloaded, so Internet Explorer was the next obvious candidate. What had changed was that Internet Explorer had been updated to version 7. A quick search of the internet confirmed it, Norton Anti-Spam 2006 is incompatible with IE7. The quickest fix was just to roll back Internet Explorer to version 6, which took a couple of minutes, although of course Windows Update immediately tried to update it back to 7 again.

Of course what would be helpful would be if Symantec could fix the problem with Norton. They have, sort of, but it involves paying for the upgrade to Norton Internet Security 2007. Typical really – one of the reasons I no longer run Norton Internet Security on the Mac is that when Apple upgraded the OS it broke Norton Internet Security, and then Symantec didn’t bother to fix the problem. If you have a read of this discussion on MSDN you’ll see it’s not actually a particularly difficult problem to fix either…