Malicious code in 1.74 upgrade?

Norton Internet Security is the malicious code there.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

Ah, the downside of a heuristic scanner. It scans for things that "might" be suspicious. In this case it probably jumped on it because the update wanted to overwrite system files.

I scanned my 1.74 patch file just now and it showed no finds, and neither did it give any alerts when I first installed it.

Is it possible the patch file was corrupted during download?
Did you download it from the Space Empires Universe site, or from some other site?

Norton has found once that a Space Empires planet .JPG had malicious code in it... (and of course it was my parent's computer, so I took the blame of it for a while :/)