Last week a popular antivirus software system reported a “false positive” related to SpendMap’s PDF printer driver.  That is, the antivirus software reported that SpendMap may contain a virus even though it does not.

The antivirus software company promptly whitelisted SpendMap, which immediately stopped the warning message, but after analyzing the problem we decided to post an update for SpendMap anyway because we can see it happening again.  Here’s why…

The virus software didn’t report that SpendMap actually contains a virus but rather that it MAY have a virus.  It was the antivirus software’s “proactive” threat detection that for some reason didn’t like how SpendMap was invoking our PDF printer driver when previewing reports.  It saw the communication between SpendMap and the printer driver as “suspicious”, and logged it as a potential threat.  No big deal.

But since each antivirus software can deal with “potential” threats differently, we decided that it would be prudent to proactively patch SpendMap to minimize any potential inconvenience to our customers.  For example, while in this case only a warning was displayed and SpendMap kept working, had the antivirus software instead quarantined or deleted any of our systems files, that might have been much harder to recover from.

So, to keep your SpendMap system running smoothly, please use the menu Help > Check For Updates, at your earliest convenience.  This will update your system to version 14.16.11.  You can see which version you are running, using the menu Help > About in SpendMap.

After applying the update, you must run SpendMap as an Administrator on each PC so that it can install the new PDF printer driver.  To do this, simply right-mouse-click on the shortcut/icon that you use to run SpendMap, select “Run as Administrator” from the menu that is displayed, then follow the prompts to install the new printer driver.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.