[dba-Tech] Laptop and Norton

LOL, I HATE Norton, for exactly this kind of crap.  I can tell you that in
order to uninstall I had to actually call their tech support (which was a
SEVERAL HOUR runaround with the least knowledgeable bunch of yahoos you can
imagine), INSISTING that I be bumped up the food chain until I finally found
the one person in their entire organization who actually knew anything at
all.

And of course I no longer use Norton, and I actively recommend that others
avoid it like the plague, which in fact it has become.

As for your particular problem... I think you are in for a long and tedious
"search the web for answers".  See if you can find any Norton related
services started, and shut them down.  Find EVERYTHING that you can on the
disk Norton related and try to delete those directories.  Boot into safe
mode (so the Norton stuff does not load) and delete the actual directories.
I use Registry Mechanic to then clean up registry pointers to non-existing
directories etc. 

Good luck on that, and I hope to see you again on our forums before you die.
;-)

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com 
-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2007 9:17 AM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: [dba-Tech] Laptop and Norton

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
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