Mac Shutdown Hang: Kaspersky 2011 (for Mac)

My MacBook Pro, running Snow Leopard i.e. Mac OS 10.6.8, often hangs during shutdown.  If I start it up, do almost nothing, then shut down it is ok. But otherwise, if I do something significant, like run Adobe Premiere, it hangs on shutdown.  The only way out is to “Button It” i.e. press and hold the Power Button to force a power-off.  This leaves the file system slightly damaged, as reported by [Boot Camp > Windows] (not sure if I have MacDrive running or not), if I happen to run that immediately afterwards.

On booting again to Mac OS, the OS appears to mend the file system and recover lost files, which appear in a [Recovered] folder of [Trash].  Typically these are files I (directly or indirectly via an application) most recently created prior to shutdown, for example Adobe project-saves and cache file saves.

This is a nuisance, and (naively at least) raises concerns of some more significant kind of damage occurring some day…

Web-search suggested maybe Kapersky Anti-Virus 2011 (for Mac) might be responsible.  My experience indeed confirmed that – once I removed Kaspersky (for Mac), the Mac OS shutdown behaved normally once again.

{BUT, as recorded in my next post, re Adobe, could the apparent Kaspersky-hang be the result of an Adobe failure-to-terminate process?}

Kaspersky removal:

  • Since my copy of Kaspersky (for Mac) was installed as part of Parallels Desktop 8, it did not come with its own installer/uninstaller package.  Instead I had to run Parallels Desktop (no need for any of the VMs to be running, just the “shell”), then use menu option: [Parallels Desktop >  File > Uninstall Antivirus for Mac…].
  • Tip: on doing that, nothing seemed to happen for quite a while, so maybe worth leaving it for say 15 minutes to see if a confirmation “Removal succeeded” message pops up.  Or if that doesn’t work, try updating Parallels Desktop and trying again (that is what I ended up having to do).

Web-Search:

Experiments:

  • See whether Kaspersky for Mac is currently operational as a kernel extension:
    • Terminal:[ kextstat -kl | awk ‘ !/apple/ { print $6 } ‘  ]
      • com.kaspersky.kext.klif
      • com.paceap.kext.pacesupport.snowleopard
  • Uninstall Kaspersky for Mac
    • No Install dmg file could be located anywhere.
    • Seems like it was installed as part of the Parallels Desktop 8 application.
  • Menu:[Parallels Desktop >  File > Uninstall Antivirus for Mac…]
    • Nothing obvious happened, except that afterwards that option was greyed-out.
  • Rebooted.
  • Terminal and Menu (as above) merely gave the same responses.
  • So what next?   Ask Kaspersky technical support maybe?
  • Found an update for Parallels.  Installed it.
  • Re-tried the previous procedure:
    • Menu:[Parallels Desktop >  File > Uninstall Antivirus for Mac…]
    • Response to this was slow, it was not obvious that anything was happening.
      • Maybe needed to go away for 15 minutes…
    • Eventually got “Sucessfully removed” message.
  • See (again) whether Kaspersky for Mac is currently operational as a kernel extension:
    • Terminal:[ kextstat -kl | awk ‘ !/apple/ { print $6 } ‘  ]
    • Nothing was returned.
      • Success?
      • But I’m concerned that the [com.paceap.kext.pacesupport.snowleopard] was removed, maybe that is needed as part of Avid?

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