Norton Antivirus is one of the most popular antivirus programs around, with literally millions worldwide relying on this software to keep their computers protected from malicious code of all sorts. You may be asking yourself “if Norton is so great, then why am I having this ccapp.exe error?” The common ccap errors which cause your computer to take ages to reboot may seem like the doings of a virus or some similar malware, but this process is in fact part of your Norton antivirus software!
ccap.exe is the Symantec Common Client Application. This is the part of your antivirus program which works in the background, scanning incoming email and watching for the activities characteristic of viruses. Is it safe to stop this process while it’s running? Well, that all depends on how you define safe. Halting the process will indeed prevent the irritating errors at startup, shutdown or reboot, but it’s important to note here that once you stop this process from running, your antivirus program won’t protect you. That said, if this process is causing you a lot of grief, you will need to do something about it.
Thankfully, there is a relatively easy fix for this issue. One of the functions of ccap.exe is to scan all of the drives on your system at startup and shutdown – and this is usually the cause of the problem. If your computer is relatively modern, it’s more than likely that it does not have a floppy drive, this medium having been largely replaced by recordable and rewritable CDs and DVDs. However, Norton Antivirus looks for a floppy drive during this scanning process and if you don’t have one, there is a delay as the program searches in vain for the non-existent drive.
This is a feature which is annoying to many users, but there are still plenty of older computers still in use out there which do have floppy drives. Naturally, Norton wants to appeal to these consumers as well, so this remains a part of the scan performed by the ccap process.
However, what you’re more interested in right now is a solution – and this is an easy one. What you’ll need to do is open the Norton Antivirus and navigate to AV Options. You’ll see an option there to enable or disable floppy drive scanning at shutdown. Disable this, save your changes and reboot. This should solve the problem – if it persists, you may need to reinstall the program.
While this ccap.exe error is not caused by a virus or spyware and is easily fixed, not all computer problems are solved so easily. Your antivirus program isn’t designed to do all of the work itself. It pays to find a high quality registry cleaner and run it regularly to remove corrupt or unnecessary registry entries, which can resolve many PC woes and greatly improve performance. A clean registry means a smoothly running system, so take good care of this vital part of your operating system.