Admins who took the time to upgrade to the latest version of McAfee's VirusScan Enterprise are reporting problems with client applications of Lotus Notes, in some cases requiring IT administrators to reinstall the email program.

The problem appears to occur after VirusScan has been upgraded to 8.5i. It causes Lotus Notes to display an error message informing users that they are not authorized to receive their own email.

"That's a major issue," an IT administrator, who asked to remain unidentified, complained. He said the problem plagues some users and not others, seemingly without rhyme or reason. In some cases, Lotus had been corrupted, requiring him to reinstall the program. For the time being he has been forced to downgrade to VirusScan 8.0.

A McAfee spokeswoman, having been informed of the report, said she would get back with more information. As of the writing of this article - tick, tock - we still had not received a return call.

So we went digging further and came across an item on McAfee's knowledge base. It acknowledged: "A new feature in VirusScan Enterprise (VSE) 8.5i is incurring a problem with the Lotus Notes client while attempting to scan the server-side mailboxes." It assured users that engineers were working to fix the bug.

It also provided a work-around, but our tipster said he was unable to get that to work.

So we did a little more digging and came across a posting on a Lotus support site. The author found that only installations that included the Domino Designer client for Windows XP and 2000 were afflicted.

"I found that on these clients functions for McAfee scanning had been added to the Notes [Actions] menu," according to the post. "Removing these lines from notes.ini and restarting the client fixed the problem."

This isn't the first infirmity to affect McAfee users. Last year a flaw in McAfee SecurityCenter made systems vulnerable to a complete system compromise, having the dubious effect of making users more secure running no security software at all. ®

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