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While a colleague left us the following message before heading off fo9r his first Covid jab. Hence I'm attempting to do some research before he returns tomorrow.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

Folks:
I had trouble installing the “2020 r3” upgrade to Flare 16. Now, maybe I know why. Earlier this week I had trouble with EmsiSoft Security interfering with the VS2019 debugger, which had made me think it was overreacting in general. Today it tried to block every attempt I made to download Flare 2020 r3, so I turned it off. This time, though, I think it found an actual malware instance - not a false alarm.

After installing the upgrade, I ran a batch publication test with the intention of making sure there were no path changes introduced by the upgrade. Instead, the Help outputs from this upgrade display a hack that alters characters in the main text of the help topics. Every 10 to 20 characters, one character is changed from its proper self to the one before it alphabetically. “Duxbury” becomes “Duxburx”, etc.

I am testing now to try to find out if the hack is “loose” or tied into the Flare upgrade software.

Perhaps a naive question, but have you somehow reverted to running Flare in trial mode? What you're describing is what Flare in trial mode produces.

Many, many thanks indeed.

Looks like what may happened here is that Emisoft saw Flare as a threat. But equally so, Flare's post upgrade message that re-activation was required, was hidden behind other activity.

The issue of such messages is something I've been concerned about for a while. Is there no program code to force a message to the foreground? I've had this kind of thing occur all too often.

But thanks again. Hopefully things will be back to normal on Monday.