Though I've never used Nortons a-v, I'm informed on pretty good authority
that these days it's very important to use one of the later generations of
a-v that intercept emails BEFORE they are loaded onto your hard drive. In
the case of Klez and similar, these virus/worms/trojans are self-executing
so will do their dirty tricks as soon as they are downloaded into your
system without any intervention on your part.

Earlier a-v programs scan emails AFTER they have arrived into your system,
thus may be ineffective against this new type of self-executing virus,
worm, or whatever you like to call such scunge.

I suspect this may be a major difference between Nortons 2001 and 2002
engines, and probably accounts for the apparent slowdown, as each email
obviously has to isolated and scanned before being permitted to write to
the hard drive.  Obviously this has to be slower than a process which first
admits the email, then scans it at leisure while the next email is downloading.

Ergo, Ian's "treacle". Only a guess on my part. There could be other reasons.

Certainly, older a-v engines are not picking up the latest forms of Klez.
Anybody running OE would be well advised to ensure that they have the
latest a-v engines---it's not enough simply to have updated a-v data files.

For full independent technical reports on the relative merits of the
various a-v programs, go to the Virus Test Center at Hamburg University at:
http://agn-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/vtc/

You will find some very interesting reading there.

This page is currently updated to 5 April 2002, the latest test being March
2002.  Be warned---there's an awful lot of reading and info available.
Interestingly, they publish a-v tests going right back to 1994!

Their testing procedures are very stringent, and the results are very
detailed. There are many more a-v programs than most of us have ever heard
of, unfortunately not all of them seem to be in English.

Don Penlington
Free computer tutorials at: http://www.geocities.com/donaldpen/
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