Hello Everyone. I've been dealing with a problem with SEP since the start of the year. I've called Symantec support several times about this issue and have not been able to get a resolution. My issue is that Symantec is clearly blocking certain functionality of Outlook, IE and Skype for Business. It allows each one to open, but Outlook will not connect to Exchange Server, IE will not load any web pages and Skype for Business will not display any contacts. Disabling Symantec and restarting these applications immediately resolves the problems with all. SEP can then be re-enabled and will work fine, for a period of time until this happens again.
This is an intermittent problem affecting only a small amount of our computers at any given time. I've uninstalled SEP and installed the latest version 14.2.758.0000 and for awhile this version ran without causing this problem. But within the last week or 2, even this version seems to be blocking. This problem has existed for me since earlier this year when the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities became a concern. It affects both Windows 10 Pro and Windows 7 Pro systems. I've been unable to find any similarities between affected machines to draw any conclusions. I only know that all 3 of those programs are affected and not always at the same time. And only on a small number of computers at any given time.
The affected users are getting frustrated disabling Symantec Endpoint Protection, closing and reopening the apps and then re-enabling SEP to continue protection. But every time I've called Symantec on this they have not been able to adequately find a cause of the problem. And often when they do help, after an uninstallation/reinstallation, the problem goes away for a long period of time which implies it has been fixed. But it keeps coming back.
Most of my computers are running either 12.2.758.0000 or 14.0.3929.1200. I've looked through the client logs and cannot see any indication these applications are being blocked, I only know it is Symantec because when I disable or uninstall, the problem goes away. All clients update daily from either my servers or the internet. This affects 3 different offices each with their own SEPM, all running the same 12.2.758.0000 version. I have created an Exception policy and included outlook.exe, iexplore.exe and lync.exe on it as log only. Yet this problem still happens on those computers so I don't think Symantec is blocking it intentionally. I think this is a result of some bug.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? Any ideas I can try? I will probably have to call Symantec again, but I don't think they will be able to identify the problem and fix it. And any reinstall will surely fix it without addressing it so the problem will continue to pop up. Any help would be appreciated.
