Have you been fighting frequent lockups, freezes or other unexplained problems where Sage MAS 90 or MAS 200 has stopped responding to your users?

Members of the 90Minds group have reported that one of the causes of many lockups for their clients appears to be the Symantec Endpoint system security software.

This suite of software includes antivirus, antispyware, firewall, intrusion prevention (protection against unauthorized access, theft, tampering, and attacks on network availability), and device control – to protect against known and unknown threats.

The traditional way to deal with anti-virus software suspected of causing system crashes or lock-ups is to exclude the data files within the MAS 90 folder from scanning.

In this instance several of my trusted consultants have reported that excluding files and directories does not seems to eliminate the crashing/lockups of MAS 90 or MAS 200 (this problem seems to occur with either product).

The only cure that seems to work is to completely remove Symantec Endpoint. Simply excluding files or turning off the scanning does not appear to be effective at stopping crashes.

IMPORTANT: System locks, crashes and freezing can be caused by MANY different problems including faulty hardware and data corruption.  In most instances if all other things have remained unchanged you should look to the latest additions or changes to your system as the most likely culprit.

Removing Symantec Endpoint is never guaranteed to solve the problem. Rather, locking or random freezing of a MAS90 system is generally solved by a series of trial and error steps – of which one would be to replace the anti-virus software.

After making slight system changes you should allow for a period of time to observe whether the problem is cured (or reduced). If you have one user who seems to start the chain of events that lead to a system lockup – have that user move to another computer for the day and see if the problem goes away.

Curing MAS90 lockups is often a process of making small changes to your system and observing whether they work. My experience has been that the best place to start is with anti-virus software. Based on the feedback of my 20+ consultant network – it is looking increasingly like there may be some concerns that cause Symantec Endpoint to not play well with Sage MAS 90 or 200.

If you have found a way to make Symantec Endpoint work – please share in the comments below so the rest of our daily readers can learn from your suggestion.