After all our years and years and years of using SM, we just restart the entire server. Makes sure that everything is starting fresh and clean. Not only that, our server is running on SSDs, so Windows boots in like 8 seconds. Same with updates. We stop SM, uninstall, reboot, install the new version.

If you turn off ClamAV and it was already running SmarterMail will not kill it. Same could be said if it were previously running and you rebooted SM, the ClamAV is never stopped by SmarterMail except when we do a "freshclam" update.

However, restarting your service even if ClamAV was not restarted should still function. SmarterMail would see it's already running and try to connect to it. So to answer your question you shouldn't have to worry about rebooting ClamAV when restarting SmarterMail, you will lose communication with ClamAV but on boot it should reconnect. It will only do this reconnection when it goes to scan an email, so if you don't see it immediately reconnect it could be that it has not yet started processing a message.

Thanks Matt, I understand the theory, but in reality that is not what happened.   Following the restart of the SM service today, I had the following message repeat over and over until I finally "shook it loose" with what I described above:

Monitoring the ClamAV report, I saw thousands of "Failed Connections" during the time the ClamAV log was displaying that stuff in the log... and NO successful "New Connections".  Once it all shook loose, that switched up and now (as is normally the case) I see ALL "New Connections" and next to no "Failed Connections".