Symantec "protection"--I have a bad feeling about this

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have this bad feeling for three reasons. (1) Last fall when I installed Windows XP, it hosed the Norton security system I had in place, and I was unable to reach anyone at customer service who could tell me how to reinstall it. In fact it went in a circular manner: Call the 800 number only to be given a web address, and the web address gave the phone number. Eventually I emailed a so-called customer service rep, whose very helpful advice was to check on the website.

Okay, I am not a rocket scientist, or a computer expert. Perhaps a smarter person would have found this more helpful. On the other hand, I’ve been pretty resourceful in the past, so I don’t think the problem was all me.

(2) I got stuff to make my computer “wireless.” (Heh. There is one less wire than before. Very helpful. But I digress.) With it came more Symantic software, pretty much the same setup I had before. So I thought I’d install it. But it ended up taking more time than I had, so I gave up until things were more propitious on the time-management front. Which was yesterday. Then I installed it.

Almost immediately my computer went way, way slower. I thought I had missed that little yellow box that warned me that some aspect or another of my computer was trying to access the Internet, and was I gonna let it? But it turns out that really I hadn’t missed it at all. Ditto the delay on my outgoing emails. Although I did appreciate its catching some nasty attempts at inflicting a virus on me. I don’t want to sound completely ungrateful.

Then my husband got on the Internet, was unable to do anything it was running so slowly, and asked me what on earth I’d put on there. Well . . . just the Symantec stuff. So I decided to remove it and see if that helped, figuring I could always put it back. Which leads me to …

(3) I can’t uninstall it! Right now, I have been trying to uninstall it for about two hours. First it said you can’t uninstall this component because it might be being used by that component–I was taking them in alphabetical order, as they appeared in my control panel. So I went to the component that might be using that other component, and it turns out I can’t uninstall it, either.

I am currently getting an error message that says:

[RedX] Norton Security Uninstall has failed. Do you want to try to uninstall again?

You bet I do.

There are three choices. ABORT, RETRY, IGNORE. I hit RETRY.

About every third time I click it, another block appears on the little bar that measure my progress (or lack thereof). If I keep this up for another couple of hours, I might actually get somewhere.

(The last thing that gave me this many problems getting it off my computer was Weatherbug. That was what led to me putting XP on in the first place. Yiiiii.)

And if Symantec products were all that good, why did they let me put Windows XP on there? Not to mention Weatherbug.

2

Hm, I have symantec’s norton internet, and have used it almost exclusively on my various boxes for at least the past 7 years and have never had a virus, never had connection problems, firewall problems, but i have also not tried going wireless…I have also never had XP hose my nortons…

Maybe it is in how I load programs…I start by loading in the OS, then the nortons, defrag…then add netscape, ad-aware and spybot, run the 2 programs and defrag, then my MMORPG [ was EQ, now is WoW] and defrag.

Only real problem I ever really had with anything was when I wanted to change routers from my netgear to something our roommate bought, and it would absolutely refuse to let EQ out into the internet to play [found out from tech services for Sony/ the router MFG that this was a known unsolvable problem…something about the way EQ required settings to be.]

3

Sigh, my SO’s machine ended up in similar straights once. I don’t recall what I had to do, but it involved editing the registry by hand to remove all Symanticness from the machine, and deleting all Norton files manually. I’ll talk you through it.

Warning, this is amputee-level doctoring. Don’t do this until you’ve really had it with Norton and are repeating DIE DIE DIE in your sleep. Ready?

Step one: do not, EVER, install anything by Symantec again. Ever. :wally Really, it’s bad stuff.

Next, we need to stop Norton or whatever from trying to start up. Go to windows->run… and type RegEdit[enter]. Edit->Find… to search. Type “symantec”. Every time regedit finds a folder full of symantec entries, delete the whole folder, everything. Search again, delete again. Do it until you don’t find any symantec entries.

Right click on the Start button. Choose Explore. In Documents and Settings/All Users/Start Menu/Programs/Startup look for anything symantec-ish. Nuke it. Also check the username folders, e.g. Documents and Settings/hilaritynsuze/Start Menu/Programs/Startup. Nuke all symantec filth.

Reboot. Norton Whatever should now not be running. Go to <boot disk>\Program Files\Symantec and delete everything that looks like it was ever installed by Norton Disk Fucker or whatever.

OK, you should have defanged the beast at this point. You can either reinstall from the CD, or, if you have any sense, go to http://www.mcafee.com and get less inept (but this stuff isn’t wonderful, either) software.

Good luck!

4

I’ll second the opinion that Symantec can be bad stuff. It’s fine in a managed corporate environment, but I’ve seen it clobber countless home PCs.

If you’re running XP SP2, dump every last morsel of Symantec software, then pick up the free and very good AVG antivirus from Grisoft. It’s much less of a resource hog and did I mention that it’s free? XP will be able to monitor AVG in the security control panel. I find it a little unnerving that Symantec is so sneaky about what it does that Windows can’t monitor it.

Grab Microsoft’s free anti-spyware tool as well. Don’t let the “Beta” scare you - it’s really good stuff. The default settings are fine for 99% of everyone out there.

Let the SP2 firewall do its thing. It’s already running - might as well use it.

5

Before you go hacking at the registry, you might want to try starting up in Safe Mode to see if you can install it when none of the pieces are running. Alternately, many installer programs have an option to remove the program as well. Try using the original disk to see if there’s an uninstall option.

6

For 2004/2005

For 2003

7

Thanks, squeegee, for the tips on getting it all out of there. The uninstall I was working on when I posted ended up taking almost four hours (and no, I did not actually sit there clicking the RETRY and IGNORE every 15 seconds for the whole four hours, which had I done so it could have been less time). I think I have got it all but man, that stuff was everywhere.

sigh

The thing is, I’d paid for it before (when I was running windows ME), and what I got with my wireless stuff was a 60-day trial after which I’d have to pay for it again. Now I’m thinking I will take the good advice offered in this thread and find something else.

Yeah, I found that pretty alarming. But I didn’t realize that until I was trying to uninstall it. (Oh, wait–I guess that’s the definition of being sneaky, isn’t it?) I am running XP with SP2, and I’ve heard from others that there is good virus and firewall protection there, so maybe they were clobbering each other, and slowing my computer down to the point where I was thinking of dusting off my Kaypro. Hey, at least it always worked.

8

In the military we use the Principles of War, borrowed roughly from Sun Tzu, to evaluate organizations, doctrines, and strategies. One of the principles is unity of command. Microsoft’s operating system is excellent at this – it takes control from the user and hoards it jealously. It is possible, however, to wrest this control from the OS, so that each function you wish to perform has only one boss: you or the OS.

Symantec, in this particular arena, is utter crap. They seize control of user functions, OS functions, and whole new functions that they’ve created, and do not hand over control gracefully (or at all). The end result is that you and Norton, or the OS and Norton, are waging private internal power struggles instead of making the computer go. It doesn’t help that, in order to firm up its power base, Norton does not obey the OS standards for uninstalling.

I can imagine Symantec engineers sitting around designing it:

“What about uninstall?”
“If someone uninstalls it, their computer won’t be safe, and if they paid for it, then they won’t be getting their money’s worth!”
“How are we going to handle packets that the firewall says are safe?”
“There’s NO SUCH THING as a safe packet. Block them all.”