Corrupted Norton Installation
I’ve been using Norton products for years. Even through the years where their suites were bloated to the point where most people suffered system resource issues from them. Even when people complained about false positives from them.
I’ve always stuck with Norton because I’ve never really had any of the problems people have complained about. In fact Norton was the only product that properly diagnosed a major virus issue I had a couple of months back that affected the Master Boot Record (MBR) of my main computer. McAfee couldn’t find it. Panda couldn’t find it. Kaspersky couldn’t find it. But Norton did. True, Norton let it on the machine to begin with but at least it was able to help me get rid of it.
In all the years I’ve been using Norton products I can only think of a few annoyances with the products that had me scratching my head. No real problems. Just annoyances that I was able to work around.
The only problem I can remember having just occurred the other night when I booted my laptop. Once Windows was loaded the hard drive thrashed endlessly. Even after several minutes the hard drive was thrashing and the startup programs would not complete loading. My first thought was that my daughter, who had been using the laptop earlier in the day, had broken something.
No problem. I booted into Safe Mode and tried to scan with Norton. But Windows gave me an error saying that there was a missing .DLL. Somehow my Norton installation had gotten corrupted.
I uninstalled Norton, rebooted Windows into Normal mode and reinstalled Norton. But when I rebooted I got the same disk thrashing issue. So I uninstalled in Safe Mode again and rebooted into Normal Windows. But before trying to install again I used the Norton Removal Tool (available here). I ran the tool, rebooted as instructed, then ran it a second time (to be sure it got everything) and rebooted again. The in installed Norton, ran Live Update (twice) and was ready to go.
I still don’t know what caused the problem but it was pretty easy (and only a little annoying) to fix.
Have you used Norton and had problems with it? Let me know.
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