What could possibly be wrong with one of the most popular Internet Security products on the market? Surely it is the most popular for a reason? Yes, PC World and other places marketing it very strongly and lots of badware being produced by … umm … bad people.
So, a friend of mine mentioned her laptop was not playing fair, something along the lines of very restricted Internet access. She has Norton Internet Security 2005 installed to keep her shiney (hehe) laptop nice and badware free. After she described the problem to me I began to become extremely concerned, Internet Secuirty was unable to be uninstalled or reinstalled because it’s installer kept crashing. Installing a fresh copy over the top wouldn’t work because it tried to execute the existing installer. Upon starting up the laptop one of Internet Security’s dynamic link libraries couldn’t be loaded because it was not a valid Windows Image *concern level raising*. I offered to take a look at the poor soldier, after consulting some friends I decided I required the services of my only flash disc with a read only switch, expecting the worse … some peice of badware crap had gone and infiltrated the system and killed Norton.
How I could not have been more wrong, in essence it was nothing more elaborate than suicide. Turns out Norton has downloaded and installed updates the previous night, which I guess were corrupt replacing the installer with a corrupt version rendering useless. Now how to remove a bastard peice of software that has a bazillion serivces without breaking the entire laptop, I set about disabling the serives and killing processes to not much sucess. Eventually it struck me, like a ton of bricks, how could I have been so stupid single user mode safe mode. I booted the laptop up and into safe mode, magic, Norton was not running any of its services or nothing. I proceeded to rename all the directories it contained files in. Upon restarting back into an unsafe mode Norton tried to run but failed with much complaint, ahh well. In went the installer CD, bingo it fired up and started to initialise. Damn, it errored. Claiming a version of Norton was already installed, foo. I wondered if it was clever enough to have searched the HDD for a previous copy laying in a decapitated state, hopefully not. I proceeded to “Add and Remove Programs” and clicked to uninstall Norton, oohnoes, the installer doesn’t exist so, Windows removed the entry from the list after a quick question. I went to reexecute the installer, which again failed because a previous installation attempt was not complete citing me to reboot; so I did.
Back at the desktop again I relaunched the installer which did its shiz, slowly but in an unbroken manner. Another reboot later and we had a working Internet Secuirty Suite, perfect. I tried to rename the directories I had already renamed (didn’t want to delete incase I needed the contents), one directory would not play ball. It had processes using files contained within it … damnit! I fired up Process Explorer off my flash disc, and checked for open handles. There they were, one of the Norton applications was using the renamed folders data. Hum ho back to safe mode I go.
Once again in safe mode I moved the offending folder out of the way, and rebooted back to unsafe mode. Norton started floorlessly, but slowly, and another peek at open handles in Process Explorer told me it was using the correct files. Victory, well almost.
To ensure no corrupt crap had managed to stow itself away on the system I ran the uninstaller, it didn’t crash 
, and removed Norton. I still think I should have removed its registry keys and files it didn’t remove. I also removed the directories I had previously renamed, and once again set about a restarting and running the installer.
Norton was now reinstalled, a reboot later, and we ran the updater (because it was giving errors which said need updates to fix,) with no drama this time around (might have been my threats 
.) Another reboot for good luck and a further logon which took a while but not was bad as it was with broken Norton, I am still suspecting Norton is slightly broken but I am not to sure why or how it is best to fix it.
Is the moral of this story “don’t update it if it is not broken”? Or don’t use Norton, Symantec, software?
