Steve Erbach
erbachs at gmail.com
Fri Jul 6 08:16:56 CDT 2007
Dear Group, I've been looking at a laptop that belongs to the daughter of a friend of mine. I was asked to look at two main things: 1) the DVD player/recorder doesn't do what it's supposed to do any more; 2) the Office suite doesn't work I treated the laptop as if it were infected with viruses and spyware at first and found, remarkably, that the owner had done a decent job of keeping things up-to-date and clean. So I tackled the problems head-on. I think that the DVD issue will have to be resolved by purchasing one of the commercial DVD decoders, InterVideo or whatever. The DVD will play music CDs and will record data CDs, but it pops up a "missing decoder" message in Windows Media Player when trying to play a DVD. OK. That's the end of THAT trail. Office, I thought, would be a no-brainer after I saw that the owner had not gone through the activation process yet. You know, the 50-use limit. I activated Office and then made sure that she was set up for Microsoft Update instead of just Windows Update. Her system downloaded a bunch of upgrades for Office 2003 and now it's up-to-date. Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint all work like they're supposed to. But not Word. During the Office upgrade process there were a couple of times when I opened Word documents successfully. But now the Word splash screen appears and just hangs there forever. When I go to terminate the task in Task Manager, Word shows as "Running". Then when I try to re-start Word, it asks me if I want to start it in "Safe" mode. Safe mode works. This, of course, isn't Windows Safe Mode that I have to start using F8 during the POST...it's a "Safe" mode I never encountered before that seems specific to Word. To back up a bit...while I was treating the laptop as if it were infected with spyware and such, I found that the owner had installed McAfee anti-virus along with Norton Internet Security. The laptop ran slowly, I thought, on startup. It took quite a few minutes before all the system tray programs were running and then, finally, I'd see the Norton Internet Security (NIS) icon snuggled up against the System Tray by itself. So I figured that maybe there was some conflict between McAfee and Norton. One other factor is that the eval period for NIS is over and Norton was alerting the user to subscribe. So I decided to disable all the Symantec stuff. I went to Computer Management and found all the Symantec Services and disabled them. Now the laptop seemed to start faster and I thought I was getting somewhere. But then I tried to get Word working. That's when it began to hang on the splash screen. I downloaded and ran SysInternals Process Explorer and found that when Word fired up it spawned a "sub-process" running "underneath" it: NAVW32.EXE, a Norton anti-virus process. I could not terminate the Norton process. I could terminate Word, of course, but the Norton process stayed active; then Word would ask to start in Safe mode the next time. I then decided to un-install Norton since its trial period had expired anyway. The uninstall process failed. I then said the heck with it and downloaded the Norton Removal Tool. I ran the NRT and ... nothing. I'm familiar with how it looks as I'd run it on my own workstation a day or two earlier to get rid of Norton Utilities 2006. I ran it again and still nothing. Again. Nothing. I looked in Sysinternals Process Explorer and saw THREE NRT processes running, taking up 68 KB each, but no I/O and no CPU cycles. I am now officially stumped. I can't un-install Norton and the Norton Removal Tool doesn't work. Any ideas as to what might be happening here? Registry corruption? Regards, Steve Erbach Neenah, WI http://TheTownCrank.blogspot.com