I’ve been using NOD32 as my anti-virus for quite some time now, and I’ve been quite pleased with it. For the most part it runs silently in the background and does not impact system performance. However, I’ve discovered there are some issues related to running Visual Studio and its interaction with NOD32.

First of all, if you develop web applications with VS, you may run into trouble. After creating a web app based on the “File System” (using the ASP.NET development web server), I would not be able to run the app from Visual Studio. When pressing F5 or Ctrl+F5, Internet Explorer would state plainly that it could not display the web page. But on closer inspection, I noticed that the port number had been decremented by 2 from that used by the development web server.

I ran across a forum post, which referenced a blog post detailing the problem and how to solve it. It turns out NOD32 Protocol Filtering is the culprit. What you need to do is disable this feature for the ASP.NET development server. Open NOD32, press F5 to show advanced settings, then in the tree-view on the left expand Web Access Protection / HTTP / Web Browsers. Click the Add button to add WebDev.WebServer.EXE, located here:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\DevServer\9.0

Click the checkbox until a Red X is displayed. This will solve the problem. As a postscript, I also had to add an exclusion for MS Word in order to publish this blog post. J