March 2, 2005
by Rich Love

There are very few things that can cause a Mac running OS X to hang. It is the most stable operating system in existence. But Virex is one of the rare exceptions. Virex is an anti-virus program which is available free on the Apple Web site if you are a .Mac subscriber.

I recently installed Virex 7.5.1 on my Dual 2 gig G5 Mac.
It causes the G5 internal modem to hang the entire Mac when you try to do anything with the modem (dial with OS X, change fax answering status, dial with a terminal emulator.
It is a very hard freeze that requires powering off the Mac to get going again.
It is also very consistent (happens every time).

This appears to be an incompatibility between Virex 7.5.x and the Apple Internal modem on most newer Macs. This is a software modem with a Motorola Driver.

Another intermittent symptom is that the Mac will not boot. It gets stuck in the final stages of booting. While looking at the progress bar, it stops at the networking setup (file sharing or Internet stuff). If you have this booting problem and cannot get your Mac to boot, try several times. If it refuses to boot, hold the shift key down while booting and then run the Virex uninstaller. Then re-boot normally.

To uninstall Virex, double-click on the file "Virex_7.5.1.dmg" and run the uninstaller.

Modem Information for my G5 Mac:

Driver: MotorolaSM56K.kext (v1.2.0)
Hardware Version: Version 1.0
Interface Type: I2S
Country: B5 (United States, Latin America)
Modem Model: Jump
Modulation: V.92

There have been many reports about this problem on the MacFixit web site. If you want to look at the history of problems, go to MacFixit and do a search for "virex modem problems".

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