Attention Kaspersky Internet Security Users

Recently, we've been getting some disturbing reports for users about our charts appearing very slowly and then sometimes disappearing after about 20 seconds.  Initially these reports were very confusing to us because we had not made any significant changes to our website that would cause those kind of problems.  In addtion, only a couple of people were reporting the problems - most people were not experiencing any issues.

Some follow-up messages from some of the people with the problem revealed a suspicious pattern - all of them were using the Kaspersky Interlet Security program to protect their Windows computers from malware.

Given that information, we spent some time today installed and configuring the latest version of Kaspersky on several different test machines.  After some tweaking, we were able to reproduce the problem!

(As many of you know, recreating the problem on a programmer's computer is 80% of the battle.)

We discovered that there were actually two strange problems that Kaspersky is currently causing for people using our website:

1.) Google Chrome users would see a SharpChart for about 20 seconds and then that chart would get replaced with a "broken image" icon.

2.) Internet Explorer users would have things work fine for 2 to 3 minutes and then they would stop seeing charts at all and would instead see a big white space.

Next, we started experimenting with the various "Settings" that come with the Kaspersky program.  The first thing we verified was that if you disabled Kaspersky entirely, both problems went away.  That confirmed that Kaspersky was the culprit.  The next thing to try was to see if there were some less-destructive settings that could be changed that would allow most of Kaspersky to continue to operate while eliminating the charting issues.

Pretty quickly, we discovered that if you only disabled as small part of the Kaspersky suite of tools - the "Anti-Banner" feature - the Google Chrome problem (#1) would stop happening.

Later, after more trial and error, we discovered that if you added "stockcharts.com" to the "Exceptions " list for Kaspersky's "Web Anti-Virus" feature, the second problem would also stop happening.

So, if you use Kaspersky Internet Security 2012, here are the steps you need to take:

1.) Click on the "Settings" icon (gears) on the main Kaspersky control window.

2.) Click on the "Anti-Banner" item at the bottom of the list of features.

3.) Click on the top-most checkbox that appears to disable the "Anti-Banner" feature, then click the "Apply" button.

4.) Click on the "Web Anti-Virus" item which is about 4 items down on the list of features on the left side of the window.

5.) Click on the "Settings..." button that appears

6.) Click on the "Trusted URLs" tab that appears

7.) Click "Add" and enter "stockcharts.com" to the list of trusted URLs.

8.) Click "Apply" and then "OK" to close the Kaspersky window.

Those changes _should_ fix any slowness issues and/or disappearing chart issues that you have.  Let our Support Team know if you still see problems after following these steps.

Tracking down issues with Anti-Virus/Firewall programs like Kaspersky can be maddening.  If you see problems like this, please follow the general approach I outlinded above (disable everything, does it still happen?, un-disable various sections until it goes away, etc.).  Finally, when reporting this kind of "strangeness" to us, be sure to include the names of any security programs you use.

- Chip