Yesterday I let Norton upgrade itself, and my computer stopped working. It even threw a BSOD! I removed norton in safe mode, using regedit to manually remove all the keys. When I finally got it entirely removed, my machine stopped crashing. However, I can’t use the network. I have reinstalled xp pro and everything else seems ok. Anyone know the solution to this?
Are you sure you got it all? Norton has a removal tool to clean up after their uninstaller. Give that a try.
I just did, and it did not help. I have uninstalled the network driver, and when I go to install it again, it gets so far, says file not found, and then quits.
Thank you for the suggestion.
Just curious; how did you remove Norton in safe mode? Whenever I try that, it says the uninstaller cannot run in safe mode.
Can you go to System Restore and pick a restore point a day or two before removing Norton? Worth a try.
Norton (and MacAfee) are notorious for being difficult to remove. Only one reason many people avoid them like the plague.
There is a really nifty free program called Revo Uninstaller that not only uses a program’s uninstall system first, but then scans and removes all mentions of it from your computer and from the Registry. I’ve used it often and it works fine. It was recommended by PC World magazine.
We finally got it back to normal. The network stuff would not work. I did not use uninstall. I removed Norton, in safe mode, by removing every registry reference to Symantec or Norton, or variants thereof, rebooting, removing all the related files, rebooting to regular mode, seeing what Norton cruft still appeared and repeating until it was clean. And everyonce in a while, installing xp again over top the existing installation. When we removed the bulk of Norton Internet security, svchost stopped crashing and the BSODs stopped for a bit.
I don’t know if I messed up a registry key, or if the network disconnect was a gift from Norton. Reinstalling in any way that preserved my software installations did not fix the issue.
KellyM , installed xp to another drive which had never had an os installed. She then exported bits of the registry and copied over files from the windows directory. This seemed to fix most of the issues, but there were a few left.
She realized that the drive names were funky and so changed those around, and it stopped booting, even in safe mode. So she booted to the new install of xp and loaded the hives from the other install, fixing all the drive references she could find, and unloading the hive. Then she did another repair install. That got it mostly working, including the network. Just a little more regedit to find the remaining inconsistencies, and changing the drives to exactly what there were before, a little windows update, and we could reinstall the video drivers. Now, everything seems to work, and my pc seems to be Norton free.
I will look into Revo uninstaller. Having something replace a few of the thousands of symantec references for me would have been handy.
Norton creates its own little proxy server IIRC, breaking norton = broken proxy = broken network.
For future info, resetting the TCP/IP stack can help a problem like this. At a command prompt, or at Start, Run, enter
netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt
It was a bit more serious than restting the IP stack, although that was part of the fix. Good advice.
It seemed like a class installer for the network was missing, so when we installed a driver for our NIC, it got to the point where it would hook into the OS, could not find the place to hook into, and then rolled back the whole install.