Symantec has incurred the wrath of UK vicars after a sermon-writing program was branded spyware.

Visual Liturgy was rendered useless after users deleted a file that had been incorrectly identified as spyware by Symantec’s Norton antivirus software.

A Norton antivirus update on 8 July wrongly decided that a file called vlutils.dll was part of a keylogging program called SniperSpy. In fact the file was an integral part of Visual Liturgy, and users who deleted it crippled the program.

Church House Publishing (CHP), official Church of England publisher and creator of Visual Liturgy, was subsequently inundated with calls from users wanting to know why their software wasn’t working. CHP reported the problem to Symantec on 10 July – and apparently received no response.

In a statement on its website, CHP says: “There has been some debate about when the issue was actually fixed. Symantec has stated that it fixed it on the 11 July and emailed us to confirm the fix at that time. We have no record of any such email.”

For its part, Symantec said it resolved the issue soon after the first complaint. The security firm advised people to update their anti-virus so the problem would not happen again.

David Green, CHP’s outgoing new media manager, said: "Up to 4,500 churches with approximately half a million churchgoers have been badly affected by this. Usually, it takes a lot to get a clergyman upset, but we have had a fair few on the phone. There's been no talk of smiting yet, but we'll wait and see."

While waiting for Symantec to fix the bug, CHP made a new copy of vlutils.dll so that users could get Visual Liturgy working again.

The CHP statement concludes with a heart-warming call to get on with business as usual. “We heartily welcome the news that Symantec has fixed the issue, and that users who have both Visual Liturgy and Norton antivirus software installed can once again use both software packages normally.

“We wish Symantec all the best in its endeavours to successfully identifying malware in the future.”