Norton Antivirus auto-updating to breaks Internet Explorer 11
Auto updating the Symantec’s Norton Internet Security causes the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 11 to crash. The anti-virus maker Symantec came under tremendous fire from users who took to web and social media networks after they discovered their Internet Explorer 11 browsers crashing once the NIS auto updated itself.
The issue was first brought to notice by a user Sunfox on the official Norton Community forum on Friday evening with the following message:
“Running NIS on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit with IE11 (latest updated). Sometime this evening, IE11 started crashing. In fact, it crashed an already-open browsing session, and now trying to start it up just instantly causes a ‘Internet Explorer Has Stopped Working’ error. Tried resetting IE11 settings to default. No change. Tried running IE11 in no-addons mode. No change. Now, IPSEng32.dll is a Norton file. So I uninstalled NIS. Bingo – IE11 started working like normal. Re-downloaded and re-installed NIS. At the outset (said last updated 20 hours ago) IE11 worked fine. Then it auto-updated and applied a patch… and instantly IE11 stopped working again. Ergo, something Norton did is breaking my IE11. Doesn’t seem to have affected another computer I have running IE10.”
Any ideas?
“EDIT: The other IE10 PC had been asleep and hadn’t updated NIS yet. It is also now crashing in exactly the same manner as this one… and since that PC is almost entirely unrelated to this one in terms of software being used, this is going to be a bigger problem than just me.”
As per Sunfox, the Internet Explorer 11 worked normally after uninstalling the Norton Internet Security suite which means that the auto-updated dated 20.2.2015 was at fault. Sunfox was joined by many users who faced the same issue until Norton employee Nikhil_CV came up with commented on the forum that Norton had fixed the issue :
“Hi people
Issue has been fixed . Kindly run manual live update (right click on Norton icon on tray notification area > ‘Run live update ‘)
Repeat the step till it says no more updates found and verify the update at path :
{C:\Program Files (x86)\Norton product name\NortonData\version number of product\Definitions\IPSDefs\20150221.001 }
ver 20150221.001Kindly stop using work-arounds.”
Symantec won praise from Norton users for the quick fix and engaging with its users. Win8InFL praised Symantec for its smart turnaround time.
“Just did another update and the issue with IE 11 is fixed. Now THAT’s what I call turnaround time. Congratulations to Symantec, and Kudo’s [sic] for the fact that these forums are actually looked at by the company, unlike those of some other manufacturers.”
Lately a lot of tech companies are botching up with their updates and patches and Norton is the latest offender of botched though Microsoft remains the uncrowned king at issuing bungling patches.
