Latest McAfee antivirus clashes with Lotus Notes

People who use both IBM Lotus Notes and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise may want to hold off on upgrading to the latest version of the McAfee software.

Installing McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i on a PC that also runs the Lotus Notes email client can lock people out of their mailboxes, the two companies have confirmed. Lotus Notes is a commonly used email application, particularly in larger organisations. McAfee, the world's second-largest antivirus company, released VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i in late November.

One IT administrator for a California company, who asked not to be identified, said: "The upgrade locks people out and is causing Notes errors where we can not even restart Notes but need to reinstall. This issue has created a higher-than-normal demand on our helpdesk. The cost to our company due to this issue is increasing every hour."

IBM and McAfee have both published support notices on the problem. The issue affects systems running Lotus Notes versions 6 and 7, according to the notices.

After working with Lotus Notes for several hours, an error message will pop up: "You are not authorised to perform that operation," according to the undated McAfee alert. The pop-up can be closed but the user won't be able to do anything else in Notes until it is closed and restarted, McAfee said. The same error will then reoccur later, it said.

A McAfee representative said in a statement: "The problem is limited to a few customers running Lotus Notes who have installed the latest version of McAfee VirusScan. McAfee's engineering team is working hard to resolve this issue and the company is keeping customers informed of developments."

McAfee currently has no definitive solution. As a workaround, the company suggests in its support article disabling the "scan all server databases" and "scan server mailboxes" features in its product.

IBM in its support note lists another workaround: "Completely disable the antivirus software."

An IBM Lotus software division representative said: "We take product support issues very seriously and will work hard to examine this situation to help our customers resolve it."

At the California company which experienced the issues, support staffers are rolling back installations of McAfee VirusScan. The IT administrator said: "Our only action that worked was to remove 8.5 and downgrade to 8.0i."

Joris Evers writes for CNET News.com