Symantec Protection Engine (SPE) 7.5 or 7.8 service stops within seconds of the service starting.
The SymantecProtectionEngineAbortLog.txt contains:
2017/02/01-10:24:44 301 XML path not found : report.xml:/report/SinceInstall/VirusFound/@value.
2017/02/01-10:24:44 0 Symantec Protection Engine is shutting down; logs may contain more information.
The default locations for the SymantecProtectionEngineAbortLog.txt are
Windows:
Linux:
There was a problem with the report.xml. The file had been externally edited using a non standard editor (such as wordpad). When saved the file was corrupted and encoded with blocks of binary data that could not be parsed by the service.
This issue has been resolved in SPE 7.8.1 and later.
Workarounds for older versions:
Wrong version? For SPE 7.9 and later, see:
Title: 198647 - Protection Engine service stops unexpectedly during service start
URL: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=198647