Article
08 August 2006

Statement from Church House Publishing

Concerning Norton Anti-virus software, SniperSpy and Visual Liturgy

On Saturday 8 July, Symantec issued a new virus definition for Norton anti-virus software. That update had a significant detrimental effect on Visual Liturgy. On 14 July following a week of enquiries with Symantec, we issued a statement on this website concerning the problem and advising Visual Liturgy users how best to respond.

In the last 36 hours, this particular story has been covered by a number of different websites including the BBC and Zdnet.co.uk who first broke the news.

We are pleased to report that the news coverage has brought a resolution to the matter in that Symantec have confirmed that the problem has now been fixed. We have spoken with several users this morning who have verified that information.

There has been some debate about when the issue was actually fixed. Symantec have stated that they fixed it on the 11th of July and emailed us to confirm the fix at that time. We have no record of any such email.

We recognize that while spam filters may have blocked their response or we may have dropped the ball in the communication process, we have checked our systems and can still find no record. We have spoken with a member of staff at Symantec this morning and seen a copy of the email that was sent on 11 July. Even so, we can see no indication in that email that they were confirming the issue was fixed at that point.

However, all such conversations are secondary to the fact that we heartily welcome the news that Symantec have fixed the issue and that users who have both Visual Liturgy and Norton antivirus software installed can once again use both software packages normally.

We hope and trust that Visual Liturgy will not be the victim of such a 'false positive' virus report again. Since the matter escalated to a level that was totally unnecessary and ostensibly because of a lack of communication, we hope that Symantec might join us in examining the major reasons for the breakdown.

1. Despite there being no evidence as yet of any such email from Symantec on 11 July, we will be checking our systems and filters to ensure that such information reaches relevant staff in future.
2. We would ask Symantec to consider whether it is acceptable that their stock advice to us was that it would take four weeks to sort out? Are they getting so many false positives that the workload is too high? Alternatively, if the workload is not high, how can they justify taking so long to respond?
3. We would hope Symantec might examine why small businesses like ours have no real recourse or line of communication to their Security Response team when such a false positive arises? Additionally, we would ask Symantec to find ways in which their Consumer Services team (to whom we did speak) could be kept informed of the fixes being issued by their Security Response team so that they are better placed to advise companies like ourselves as to the latest situation when a problem arises.

To conclude, we would want to repeat that we heartily welcome the news that Symantec have fixed this issue. We are glad to see that this matter is now fully resolved just within the four week deadline that they set themselves. We wish Symantec all the best in their endeavours to successfully identifying malware in the future.

In the meantime, if you are a Norton user and were hit by this issue previously and need to help to restore your copy of Visual Liturgy, you may like to note the advice that follows:

If you have already removed vlutils.dll

You can download the file vlutils.dll by downloading it from our website. With Visual Liturgy closed, save it to your computer hard drive at the following location:

c:\program files\visual liturgy 4\

Please do comment

If you feel strongly about this issue, please feel free to visit the discussion forum linked below and contribute in the Version 4.0 forum to the thread entitled 'Statement about Norton, SniperSpy and Visual Liturgy'.

With best wishes

Thomas Allain-Chapman
Head of Publishing, Church House Publishing

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