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Author Topic: Frustrated with Defender, mcAfee etc anti virus blocking autohotkey exe !!  (Read 143 times)

anandcoral

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I have so many apps in autohotkey in NANY.

I was making a new app in autohotkey, and exe was blocked by Mcafee repeatedly. I disabled it. Fine. (Win11)
Then same exe is blocked by  Smart App Control of MS itself. Could not find simple way to disable it.

Frustrated now I am planning to do in C# itself, as MS and McAfee are both happy with it. !!!

Anyone else facing similar situation and any other option is there ?

Ath

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Hm, the most recent version of Autohotkey is nearly a year old, so that's had enough time to earn some trust, and avoid being blocked by the regular AV packages.
I haven't used McAfee AV for about 10 years, the first thing to remove from a new computer when installed in fact, as it's not worth the money they ask for it, any free offering used to be better and lower on system resources, and currently MS Defender is leading the free offerings.

Any half decent AV package has options to exclude folders from (excessive) scanning, and that's where your AHK dev folders should be added (in fact, any development folder should be added there, to avoid all files being scanned at every compilation), so you can actually work on your software, without being bothered by unneeded and overzealous AV actions.

Unfortunately we can't access the internet and not have AV on our computers, though you can switch away from Windows, but that can be hard, I know. Most part of my development-life is on Windows, though for some parts I've switched to building on WSL2, as that's up to 5 times faster, compared to working directly in Windows. But I'm not producing Windows executables there, only IoT related stuff to be installed on microcontrollers ;)

anandcoral

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Problem is not me using win or other o/s.
Problem is user facing false virus blocking of exe.

So I found best to play with the big houses rather than fight them. Users are priority for me.