Is your Antivirus application affecting your your SOLIDWORKS installation?

This post is regarding one of those topics that I repeat daily when speaking with our customers: temporarily disabling any Windows and SOLIDWORKS Antivirus or Anti-spyware applications that may be protecting your system.

Before any corporate IT personnel read this and start feeling faint, allow me to clarify…we are speaking of temporarily shutting down the Antivirus applications in terms of your installation of SOLIDWORKS.  More specifically the need to disable the Antivirus or Anti-spyware  if there are modifications or changes to the setup that involve the SOLIDWORKS installation utility.

Having said that, among the first comments I will likely see in regard to this post are something along the lines of

“Um, Chris, there is a list of Antivirus software that is supposed to be compatible with SOLIDWORKS”.

To that statement, I say YES! Indeed there is. However we often see the most stability from an installation of SOLIDWORKS that has had the User account control disabled and the Antivirus shut down during the installation, therefore I shall continue along with the rest of my post.

Is it really disabled?

The next short discussion that usually pops up is with a customer who believed they had completed the shutdown of their Antivirus application via an icon in the System Tray (Near the Clock in the Taskbar – now called the “Notification area” in Windows).  Most shortcuts that reside in the notification area will generally disable the Active scanning abilities of your Anti-Virus program temporarily, however the protection that the application asserts over the registry is still enabled, which can cause a host of seemingly unrelated issues with your SolidWorks installation.

Don’t blame the Antivirus application, it’s simply doing the job it is supposed to do, protecting your PC from harm.  We simply need to know how to work with it so we can make the changes to our system without issue.

Before I get into the exact steps below, time for a little disclaimer:  If you are not comfortable with being under the hood of your operating system, and throwing a few switches…please stop reading, seek an IT professional (or your nearest 12 year old computer whiz kid) and have them read the remainder of this post.

Disabling a SOLIDWORKS antivirus application

Generally we perform this type of operation through the services panel. Within the services panel you should have access to all of the services running on the computer, including the root services that run your antivirus application. You will likely require administrative privileges on the computer prior to making these changes.

Windows Services

1. Start Windows Services
   • Windows 7:
     1. Right-click on your “My Computer” icon (on the desktop or in the start menu)
     2. Choose “Manage” from the shortcut menu to enter the “Management Console”
     3. When the Management console has started, Expand the “Services and Applications” Node (Near the bottom of the list). Then choose the “Services” listing in the expanded drop down.
   • Windows 10: enter Services into the search box in the taskbar
2. Search the list for the services that pertain to your virus scanner (you may have to Google this to find out the names of the appropriate processes).
3. Once you have found the services you would like to disable, Right Click the service and choose “Stop” from the shortcut menu.
4. If you are planning a number of updates or restarts and would like to ensure that the virus-scanner does not start-up in-between rebooting the computer. Double click on the service to open up the properties for that service and set the start-up type to disabled.

Once your changes on the system are complete, please ensure that you re-enable these services to keep your computer safe and out of harm’s way.