Computer problem - Norton vs. freecell

Factual Questions
1

My mom is having a weird computer problem that I was wondering if anyone else has had or knows what might be causing it.

She recently installed the newest version of Norton Utilities, with a firewall, virus protector, etc. Now her freecell and hearts games (the games that came with Windows 98) don’t work – until after she’s been on-line. Once she has logged on and logged off again, the games start working. Is Norton somehow affecting the games? What does being on-line have to do with it?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

2

Joel did some searching on Google and found a lot of people have had this same problem, and Norton/Symantic haven’t been particularly helpful in fixing it. If you have any advice, it’s appreciated, but I understand if you don’t. :frowning:

3

This surprises me mightily since I never would have guessed a connection between networking and Freecell, which basically is a standalone program. With Hearts I can understand some relation with networking.

Anyway, if it bothers your mother, you might try to download one of the many free Freecell clones on the 'net. Look at www.freecell.org, of www.freecell.com. One of those might work without this problem.*

I’m not sure whether there are Hearts clones.

  • I know, this doesn’t solve the problem as you described it. But if your mother only wants to play (and doesn’t really care about her old high-scores), it would help her cravings for card games.
4

If I’m right, then the problem is very likely to be the permissions and access to the net allowed by the firewall part of those programs.

She needs to read the manual, and allow net access to those programs, or look into the options of the games and see if they can be configured never to access the net.

To configure the firewall click on the icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen or bring it up from your ‘Start’ button.

This will bring up a menu showing the status of various components of your Norton software.

Mine shows the following,

Security - On
Personal firewall - On
Intrusion detection - On
Norton Antivirus - Attention. (this is because I don’t have ‘Liveupdate’ enabled)
Privacy control - On
Ad Blocking - On

Although it does not look like any kind of button, run the mouse pointer over ‘Personal firewall’ and click on it.

This brings up a menu window just to the right of the panel, and near the bottom of that there are two buttons marked,

Turn Off
Configure

Click on ‘Configure’ and you get another rather plain looking menu with various tabs and options.

Select the tab marked ‘Programs’ and from the menu that appears here there should be another button marked ‘Add…’

If you click on ‘Add…’ this will bring up a search box, and you need to be able to locate any program executables (icons or .exe files) that you want to have net access.

Locate freecell and add it to your firewall program net permissions.

You can on the same menu use the check box to allow ‘Automatic program control’ which should set up new internet access rights.

What this does is detect when a program wants to access the net, and asks you wether you want to allow it to do so. I you deny that program access to the net, you will not be asked the question again, it will be prevented automatically.
The Norton firewall is pretty cumbersome when compared to Zonealarm firewall, but Zonealarm uses up far too much of your computers resources in my opinion and it does not always release those resources when it has finished with them, over a goodly period of time Zonealarm brings your computer to its knees until you reboot.