Windoze and NAV

Phew!! A couple of days ago I helped a friend re-enable his Norton Antivirus realtime protection. The process took about 4 (four) hours!!

Details:
My friend has a Dell machine and uses WinXP Pro. He complained that his scheduledl virus scans did not start and there was an error whenever he tried doing a manual scan. So when I got some time, I went fully loaded (Knoppix Live CD, a CD-RW containing Firefox, Thunderbird, Spybot, AdAware, Zone Alarm, Norton Corporate(University license allows students to use at home. Hence is a legit copy!!) AV, and PMagic boot floppies.
I tried changing settings and stuff but the scan would not start. I asked my friend since when was this happening. He said since he did some settings change, installed SP2 and a system restore!! :( I have never trusted a system restore and this SP2 was a bigger pain. So to be on the safer side, I did a manual update of the virus definitions and tried a manual scan after rebooting. Nothing!

Finally, I decided to uninstall NAV and redo the installation. When I tried to uninstall, it asked for a password. I figured that being NAV corporate client version it might require some special password, which obviously I didn't know. So back to google searching for solutions. The most promising(and dangerous) one was: manual uninstall.

Backed-up the registry in case I screwed up the manual uninstall. Then I started the steps of manual uninstall one-by-one. Symantec spills a lot of registries when it installs the antivirus. It took me almost an hour and a half to finish it. And still I'm sure there would be some registries present indicating previous NAV install. Somebody should sue Symantec for screwing up the users machine even when they have unistalled the software.

Reboot. Check antivirus. Absent. Install again. Done. Manual virus definitions update. Reboot. Realtime protection was still not on. But I was able to scan the machine. Live update wasn't working either.

Realtime protection was set to ON after another reboot. That was a breather... But liveupdate was still not working. After a bit of searching, I checked the list of Remove/Install Programs. Lo and behold, Live update which should have been there was not listed. I started the liveupdate setup and got it to work in the end.

His NAV client is working fine now. Also as the SP2 has a firewall, I told him the the rest i.e. Firewall, and malware check will have to wait for next time. I just hope everything stays the same the next time visit him for pending things. You never know when problems will be there in your Windoze OS.

:) It feels nice to be using Debian after seeing these kind of things.