Helpful tips about antivirus software

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Cache articles in the Old Knowledge Base

• Clearing the cache
• Moving the cache
• False cache virus alerts
• Norton AntiVirus and the cache

From time to time, antivirus software sometimes reports files in the Second Life cache directories as viruses.

These are almost certainly false positives. There are two major problems with trying to upload a virus into Second Life, let's say as a texture that subsequently downloads into someone's unsuspecting cache and there executes its maleficent purpose:

• If someone tries to upload executable code as a texture, Second Life checks to make sure the texture is valid; textures that fail these tests don't get uploaded at all
• Second Life never actually executes code in the cache anyway

So basically, if someone tried to upload a virus into Second Life, chances are good it would never make it in there in the first place, and even if it did show up in someone's cache, it would just sit there and be useless.

You can safely turn off virus scanning in the following directories:

• The Second Life skins directory (i.e. C:\Program Files\SecondLife\skins )
• The Second Life cache, which you can find in the Network tab of the Preferences window in Second Life under Disk Cache Location (i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\SecondLife\cache)