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Reference Question of the Week – 4/17/16

   April 23rd, 2016

featureSince I am helping patrons less than before, the relative number of reference and tech support questions I get from staff have gone up. This is one of those.

One day right as I was getting ready to leave for the day, someone working at the Circ Desk called down to say that Evergreen (our ILS) wouldn't open. That's weird, but important enough for me to stick around a few minutes to try to fix it.

When I got upstairs and asked for details, my coworker said,

Well, something bad happened to the computer and it froze, so I forced it to shut down and then restarted it. When it came back up and I clicked on Evergreen on the desktop, it wouldn't open.

Now that is odd. I had no idea what "something bad" might have entailed, but at least the computer was on and working, so that's a good sign. I double-clicked the desktop shortcut and sure enough, it didn't work - I got that "cannot find target" error. Thinking just that shortcut got changed somehow, I tried the icon in the Start Bar, and then the one in the Start Menu, but kept getting the same error.

Hmm. So I looked at the target of the three, and all of them were the same. Also odd. I browse out to that directory, expecting to see the evergreen.exe file they were pointing at, but it's not there. I check look at that directory on a different computer that is working, and sure enough, there is an evergreen.exe file.

Now that is weird. This was far enough down into the directory structure that I didn't think any staff would have accidentally deleted it, but I couldn't think how else something would have happened to this single file and left everything else in the directory.

The immediate fix that comes to mind is to completely reinstall Evergreen, which is a pain, and I'm still trying to get out the door to go home. So, I figure what the heck, I'll just copy/paste the evergreen.exe from the good computer into that same directory on the problem computer and see what happens. This is like Windows 3.x stuff, and figure it's an incredible long shot.

But holy smokes, it actually works! I copied that file to the network and then pasted it in from there, and when I clicked the desktop shortcut on the problem computer, it opened right up as if nothing ever happened. I don't really understand it, but I'll take it - at least as a temporary fix to get Circ through the evening.

In the morning I asked our IT guy to reinstall Evergreen on that computer for real, because I figure what I did was fragile and didn't address whatever the "something bad" was that started this whole thing. Before he did that, he did some checking on the computer and then got back to me:

Symantec classified Evergreen as a virus yesterday. I didn’t check but I presume that Evergreen.exe was moved to the Quarantine area. When you copied it back to the original location you resolved the issue. There should be no need to reinstall.

Sort of an unusual thing. I modified our Symantec policy to exclude this file. It shouldn't happen again.

Wow. I have no idea why Symantec suddenly took an intense dislike to the most important application we use every day, but there you go.




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