How to approach whitelisting an app/exe

Question

We have an application that auto-installs upgrades of itself on our customers' (Windows OS/PCs) computers. It is lightweight (650K) and does a very specific task for our customers in helping us collect data for them as part of our overall service to our customers. It first checks our website to see if a newer version of the app exists and downloads the latest version. The problem we are encountering more and more is two-fold:

1. Some anti-virus software thinks it might be malware and blocks it.
2. Some firewall software thinks it is a trojan and blocks it from attempting to send back the very data it was intended to send back.

We can, one-by-one, help customers who are not very adept at knowing what the issue is and how to solve it but this is very time consuming. It re-appears on each new version it seems we publish for auto-downloading and upgrading (about once a quarter on average). Seeing that we have about 1500 customers, this is very difficult to manage.

Please share with me any approach you have implemented or how you might solve this issue.

More details: the app is a VFP 8 exe. It has a shell app that launches first, sees if there is a new version, downloads new version, and then launches it.

Answer 1

what mechanism are you using to try to connect to the internet... are you trying via something like

loIE = CREATEOBJECT("InternetExplorer.Application")
loIE.Visible = .T.

* Tell IE to load a page
llSuccess = loIE.Navigate("http://www.YourSite.com")

* Wait for IE to do it
llSuccess = lWait( loIE )

then calling some additional settings to invoke your stuff. Then, it would appear that its really Internet Explorer doing the stuff and would offer less questioning to the access vs your VFP app itself calling via low-level API calls directly.