Mac OSX 10.4.7, Entourage 11.2.5, and Norton Antivirus 10.1

If you have Entourage connected to an Exchange server and are using Norton Antivirus, you may have noticed that Entourage is continually stalling and running slowly and displaying the spinning beach ball.

With Norton 10.0 this was caused by the Auto-protect going through the MUD (Microsoft User Data) folder. By opening the Norton Auto-Protect preferences and adding this folder to your safe zones, the problem was fixed.

The MUD folder is located at:
/Users/username/Documents/Microsoft User Data

For most users, it's not a problem blocking this folder when using Exchange as their network administrator will have multiple layers of protection scanning email before it even gets to the users mailbox.

After Norton was updated to 10.1, the problem resurfaced and it turns out that Norton was also scanning the Spotlight folder. By adding this folder to your Safe Zones with Norton Antivirus 10.1, Entourage should return to it's normal performance levels.

The spotlight folder is located in the root of your drive at: /.Spotlight-V100
The folder is located in each partition, so if you have multiple drives, be sure to add each spotlight folder from each drive.