Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.  - Oscar Wilde

One of the jobs I did before Sage involved some fairly intense electronics. One particular piece of equipment had a habit of not working when an insignificant light bulb burned out. It seemed that the engineers who designed it hadn’t considered that an expensive piece of equipment could be shut down by a ten cent light bulb.

Fast forward many years, and we are facing a similar situation with some versions of antivirus blocking certain operations in Sage.

Specifically, when some customers try to upgrade their old files from 2014 or older version to 2016 format, the antivirus programs can sometimes see the process as a virus, and stop it. The message after this happens is ‘Unable to open company file’.

Since the message does not indicate the reason why the file could not be opened, it’s logical to assume that there was an error in the file itself, not that the process was blocked.

The two most common antivirus programs I’ve encountered that do this are McAfee and Avast. In both cases, simply right-clicking on the icon on the corner of the screen and disabling real-time protection or real-time shields, depending on the software, allows the conversion to complete successfully. Although those are the two most frequent ones I see, there are other antivirus programs which have the same characteristics.

Once the file is converted successfully, the antivirus program can be turned back on, and it should not affect the file any more.

Think of it as temporarily replacing a bad light bulb.

Fun trivia for this post:

In my third book, a character plays an unusual version of ‘Russian Roulette’ in order to get a suspect to talk.

I was thinking about the statistics of the scene in the book, and of a SAFE version of the game which I’ll call ‘lampshade roulette’, played SAFELY by two people.

In it, a person has a six-shot revolver with only one bullet. That person spins the chamber, then takes one shot at a lampshade. Chances are only one in six that they will get the bullet in the chamber, and five in six that nothing will happen. The other person then takes the same revolver and spins the chamber again, and also takes one shot at the lampshade.

The question is, how many shots will the two people take before it becomes likely that they actually damage the lampshade?

The answer is counter-intuitive.

On the first try, there is a 5/6 chance, or 83%, that the gun will not fire. On the second shot, the chances are 5/6 X 5/6, or 69%, that it will not fire. By the fourth attempt, the chances are 5/6 X 5/6 X5/6 X5/6 that the gun will not go off, or around 48%. The answer then, is that by the fourth attempt, it’s more likely than not that the lampshade will be damaged.