Delphi 7 Application and Microsoft Security Essentials

Question

We have a Delphi 7 application running on numerous client machines. Recently, some of the client machines started using Microsoft Security Essentials. It started identifying our executable as malware and promptly shut it down. The message displayed by MS Security essentials is:

"Security Essentials detected items on your PC that it doesn't recognize......"

Odd thing is it does not always occur at the same option in the application. You can do the very same operation on subsequent logins and sometimes it works and other times security essentials closes it down. This makes it extremely hard to narrow down to a specific cause in our application.

I tried running the application with elevated account privileges and was still able to get it to fail. I was unable to duplicate the issue when running a Delphi XE2 compile of the same application.

Any ideas about what to look for? We are really trying to avoid adding our application to the Security Essentials exclusion list. Our application has never been identified as a problem with varying security programs (norton, mcaffee, etc.).

Answer 1

I once had a similar issue with an executable built using Delphi(7), though it had nothing to do with Delphi-7. It just so happens that some part of the executable matches some virus signature or the AV heuristic scan suspects that something is wrong with the executable. One thing you can try is to change some of the compiler settings such as Debug options. Changing Debug Information or using debug DCUs might result in a slightly different byte sequences in the final executable.