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Shield greyed out band 'Sophos is not running' warning since last update

Hi.

I manually updated Sophos Free for Mac yesterday, and am now getting the above warning message every startup.  The 'shield' is permanently greyed-out and in the preferences pane I can't turn 'On-access Scanning' on - it's stuck on off and the start/stop button is greyed out at 'Stopping'.

I suspect a preference file has got corrupted somehow, but is it safe to trash them all and start again?

Thanks,

Martin.



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Parents
  • Thanks, but I don't know which version I updated from: it was probably a few weeks since my last manual update. I'm still suspicious that a prefs file has got corrupted somewhere. Trouble is there are a LOT of Sophos prefs, so I've no idea which to ditch, or if it's safe to do so… Any suggestions? I'm tempted to uninstall and start again...
Reply
  • Thanks, but I don't know which version I updated from: it was probably a few weeks since my last manual update. I'm still suspicious that a prefs file has got corrupted somewhere. Trouble is there are a LOT of Sophos prefs, so I've no idea which to ditch, or if it's safe to do so… Any suggestions? I'm tempted to uninstall and start again...
Children
  • I've been having a similar problem. Also using 9.4.2. It's not happening on every start-up but twice so far this week. If I manually upload after getting the warning, the shield goes from gray back to black. If I restart immediately afterward, it loads fine upon reboot.
  • UPDATE: uninstalled using the 'uninstaller' app, which was rather scary as the process crashed with no way of knowing if it had completed correctly and my Mac wouldn't then shutdown - stuck at grey screen.  Had to pull the the power plug.  It started up slowly on first boot, but seemingly OK.  Disk Utility didn't reveal any issues, so re-installed Sophos AV, using the latest installer and it's now working, well mostly...

    I have to turn off both versions of Web Protection to be able to use WeTransfer or similar file transfer services.  WeTransfer say this is a Sophos issue, in common with other virus scanning software.  I live in hope that Sophos can make Anti-Virus play nicely with WeTransfer.