Update: It seems that Norton has added the builds as exception to their AV database. The tests analysed in VirusTotal online come up clean on all counts.
I have also been able to download and open builds to systems protected with Norton endpoint.
Great that Symantec finally understood the problem.
Anyway, HTML Executable 4.1 is out, and with the ability to create real stand-alone .EXE files. Since these EXE files do not unpack a DLL file into the temporary folder, there is no reason why an antivirus program would catch them (or the antivirus is badly designed or too much aggressive).
For testing, I have compiled the PDF viewer demo that comes with HTML Executable into a stand-alone ebook, and I compressed the output with UPX to make a smaller EXE file. Results are here:
http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=024c0b247304dd7f68698b82826575b7fd7d89b990624fa676139bf5c3a10bb0-1324574051
Norton didn’t trigger anything.