As a couple of customers have noted, a recent release of virus definitions for Symantec’s antivirus offerings has generated a false positive for version 4.5.2 of PTFB Pro’s installation package. We’ve reported this to Symantec and they’ve replied, say that they’ll be including a fix in their next release of virus definitions. In the meantime, we’ve put up a new release of PTFB Pro, v4.5.4.0.

The only difference between this release and 4.5.2 is that it has a newer version of the installer engine we use. This change is apparently enough to avoid the false positive from the faulty virus definitions, but if you’re already running 4.5.2 there’s no need to upgrade.

So to sum up: the original 4.5.2 release is virus free, as Symantec’s virus definition update will soon confirm, but if you prefer not to wait for that you can grab v4.5.4.0 from our site which gets a clean bill of health even with the faulty virus definitions.

For more details about false positives please check out at this wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antivirus_software, specifically the section titled “Problems caused by false positives”. It contains a potted history of some of the costlier mistakes by anti-virus products thus far.