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my friend is having problems with norton AV. it won't let him turn on the e-mail scanner, disc scanner, or the firewall. i went to his house to check it out. i clicked the enable button to turn them all on, but it didn't do anything. what should he/i do? i was thinking that i should uninstall it then reinstall it, but i don't know. HELP!!
Can you do an update and manual vurus scan? Just in case something viral is causing the problem.
no. i tried that and it still didn't work.
Does still have time left on his subscription? I have had problems with older versions of Norton and the subsription running out. What version of Norton does he have installed?
I would run an online AV scanner like "housecall" from Trend Micro or the one from Panda Software, just to be sure it isn't something "attacking " Norton.
Failing that, uninstall and reinstall, it could be that something has become corrupted or is clashing with it. Have you tried running it in safe mode, and manually activating it.
I had the same sort of problem with McAfee a while back, and reinstallation solved it. I never found out why :(
Is your friend running any other interactive security software like a firewall, spyware defence, trojan defence? that can sometimes be the cause? It might be worth switching off as much stuff as you can, then try activating it?
Cheers
nihil - McAfee is buggy that way and I've encounterd the same situation countless times. When a Dat file gets corrupted it can hose the entire program. Ocassionally I can force a dat update but most of the time I am forced to reinstall also. After saying all of that I think you are right.
There are also several different types of spyware that can disable firewalls. After you scan at Housecall, which nihil recomended, run Spybot Search & Destroy (make sure you update!) and Adaware 6.0 (make sure you update!).
One more thing to think of:
Have you tried manually updating the virus definitions?
i've tried to manually update the virus definition, but it doesn't work.
im not sure if this is common knowledge or just a rumor, but to my understanding, adaware makes its own spyware, personally i use webroot:spysweeper, of course just ignore me if im talking about the wrong thing
OK what you need to do is the following.
1. Go into "msconfig" (every os besides for windows 2000, 95 ,3.x and lower supports it) the way you get there is by going into run and typing in msconfig.
once you are in there the last tab should be startup in there it is best to disable everything even the av software and reboot.
Since all the startup app's arent listed there so after the reboot run a online virus scan such as housecall.antivirus.com there are many more but that's the one i allways use very good.
2.I had nortons and it screwed me over i had so many viruses on my computer chuck that and get bitdefender it has so far served me well you get it at www.bitdefender.com.
Still problems;
Download spybot from www.download.com and scan but i mainly think that there is a virus in his computer and it is killing the anti virus (which nortons is very prone to attack) but it could be spyware as well.
Just ask if you have any questions.