Norton Flagging Our Windows Installers

We create installers for our windows products because that makes life easier for our customers.

Over the years, we have found that Norton Anti-Virus has become more and more aggressive in its suspicion of installers which do not come from large companies.

Specifically, Norton is prone to throw a "WS.Reputation.1" error, which basically means "Norton does not specially know about this installer, so Norton cannot say that it is OK." See this Norton link for details: http://community.norton.com/forums/clarification-wsreputation1-detection

We try to maintain a variety of "common" Windows installations in-house. On some of our validation machines we run Norton AV ourselves, so our in-house testers have reported this issue as well. But our in-house testers only had to respond to a dialogue box from Norton AV in order to allow our installers to finish. Customer Service declared this to be irritating, but not a deal-breaker.

Then one of our customers claimed that Norton simply deleted the file and would not allow them to run the installer at all. Since they are a programming shop, they did not really need the installer, so we sent them the component files and they installed them by hand. So in that case the situation was merely annoying, but we realize that other shops might not be so comfortable installing software by themselves.

This issue is not unique to us: here is another frustrated small vendor's rant about this: https://www.codeandweb.com/blog/2012/06/23/how-symantec-ruins-independent-developers

While we are generally big fans of firewall and anti-virus software, and understand why our customers might be unhappy to have our installer quarantined by Norton, we are not happy that Norton is willing to be so aggressive with so little data. And it is not clear what we can do differently: the DRG market is a niche market and we will never have the volume numbers required to get Norton's attention.

So for now we feel that the best we can do is to happily provide the component files and installation instructions as an alternative if you cannot run our installer on your system. Just send us email at our tech support email box.

PS We use Nullsoft to build our installers. For more information on them, visit their wiki here: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page