City of Heroes .exe file quarantined after Spring Fling update

[Pyrth]

After updating to the latest version, I played ok. I shut off my PC for the night. When I started up my PC the next morning I tried running CoH. My Norton 360 said there was a virus attached to the cityofheroes.exe. I deleted the folders/files and tried reinstalling from scratch. I still couldn’t run CoH. I deleted everything again and installed fresh to another hard drive. Amazingly I was able to play. I shut off my PC for the night. The next morning I couldn’t start CoH again.

 

I can’t get CoH to run now on every hard drive/folder I try.

[lemming]

In all likelihood, there's a false positive happening.    This used to happen all the time and I'm a little surprised it still happens so often.

You will need to add cityofheroes.exe as an exception

[Pyrth]

Thank you very much. That worked!!

[GM Crumpet]

Yeah Norton is a pain and anything it hasn't been paid to let through it tags as a false positive and quarantines

Edited February 9 by GM Crumpet

[lemming]

4 hours ago, GM Crumpet said:

Yeah Norton is a pain and anything it hasn't been paid to let through it tags as a false positive and quarantines

Slight derail and while I worked at McAfee, we added plenty of exceptions, but no payments.   (And full disclosure, I have nothing but disdain for McAfee & Norton, but it's also a 25 year old grudge)

[GM Crumpet]

2 hours ago, lemming said:

Slight derail and while I worked at McAfee, we added plenty of exceptions, but no payments.   (And full disclosure, I have nothing but disdain for McAfee & Norton, but it's also a 25 year old grudge)

I'm probably wrong. I just don't like either of those programs and haven't for a long time. I don't know when they changed but I used Norton all the time in the 90's and 2000's. Then they went horrible.

 

[lemming]

23 minutes ago, GM Crumpet said:

I'm probably wrong. I just don't like either of those programs and haven't for a long time. I don't know when they changed but I used Norton all the time in the 90's and 2000's. Then they went horrible.

I worked at McAfee 96 - 2000.   Both of them were run by awful people, but even so there were some lines not crossed there. There were some definite immoral shenanigans, but had more to do with the usual corporate malfeasance and stock manipulation in the higher echelons.

[Doc_Scorpion]

On 2/8/2025 at 2:30 PM, lemming said:

In all likelihood, there's a false positive happening.    This used to happen all the time and I'm a little surprised it still happens so often.

Norton does not like programs that aren't used by a large number of people...  I've had it false positive on a variety of niche stuff over the years.  But it's a long time since it pinged a false positive on COH/H for me.

[WanderingAries]

On 2/9/2025 at 3:33 PM, GM Crumpet said:

I'm probably wrong. I just don't like either of those programs and haven't for a long time. I don't know when they changed but I used Norton all the time in the 90's and 2000's. Then they went horrible.

 

 

Back in that same time frame, I had a chat with a Norton rep who recommended running it from the CD, not installed as the latter would eat up resources in the background. 😛

Now a days, I stick to Defender and Webroot, but with as modern as they've managed to get Defender, you Almost don't need a branded AV. Unless you do stupid things on the internet of course, but Defender has been rated pretty good for that now a days.

[WanderingAries]

On 2/8/2025 at 5:30 PM, lemming said:

In all likelihood, there's a false positive happening.    This used to happen all the time and I'm a little surprised it still happens so often.

You will need to add cityofheroes.exe as an exception

 

I recall there being an instance or two where the actual launcher didn't get digitally signed, triggering a similar issue.