Pet peeve of today: anti virus programs producing false positives.
I use Symantec Corporate A/V. It installed with no problems and just runs, and has never caused a problem with anything else. (The same
cannot be said for Symantec's consumer oriented Norton A/V program.) Virus signatures are updated automatically over the Internet each Friday.
The last update made Symantec decide a program called cmdkey.exe was infected. Cmdkey.exe is a free, open source, 32 bit Win NT/2K/XP port of an old PC Magazine called CmdEdit. CmdEdit added command line recall and editing, aliases, and other features to COMMAND.COM. It was one of a number of programs like that, designed to fill a hole in DOS.
CMD.EXE in Windows finally added command line recall and editing, but as typical with Microsoft, the implementation was inferior to third party efforts. Because Cmdkey is based on CmdEdit, it can use the same configuration file, which is handy because I do have some old DOS software still in use an occasionally need to run a COMMAND.COM instance where I load CmdEdit.
Cmdkey.exe is run automatically by an autorun.cmd file defined in the registry as something to be executed whenever CMD.EXE is run. Symantec decided Cmdkey was infected with a virus, and deleted it. This means CMD.EXE would not run because the file wasn't there and the script aborted.
Cue grumbling while I go in and tell Symantec
not to check certain directories, then extract a fresh copy of the program from the distribution archive and drop it into the right place...
Next step is an email to the maintainer of the program giving him a heads up about the issue.
I really had nothing better to do than chase down that problem. Right.
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Dennis