Norton Strikes Again

I got a call from a friend of mine yesterday with a tech support question. He had last used his laptop on a wireless network while traveling, but once he got home and tried plugging it back into his router, he couldn't get anywhere with Internet Exploder. He said the laptop was connected but IE would not connect to anything. He had already called HP and was told it might be a driver problem. It's too bad tech support desks don't hire people with real experience to offer tech support. Of course, how many of us with real experience could stand to do that kind of work for that kind of pay?

I walked him through some of the basics (does the network icon in the system tray have an x on it? etc). Then the answer came to me. I asked him if he was running Norton Internet Security. He said yes. I told him to right click on the Norton IS icon in the taskbar and select "Close" or "Exit". He did. Wouldn't you know that suddenly IE could connect to websites?

I'm not sure of the technical issues behind it. I can pretty much sum this up with "Norton sucks". I can't say I've ever had pleasant experiences with Norton's security products. Several years ago, I was given a copy of Norton Internet Security 2003. The first thing I noticed is that it sucked more than half of my computer's performance capability away in the resources it consumed. I ran it for a couple of weeks before I got home from work to a message that Norton AV had crashed and needed to be reinstalled. I reinstalled the product. Then I started getting messages from Norton Anti-Spam that some emails had been deleted. Funny, this was about the time that my mom started calling me to ask when I hadn't replied to a question she asked. Then Norton IS crashed again and had to be reinstalled. I used the products for a while because don't you know how insecure Windows is? I got tired of emails being deleted with no chance of retrieving them, and I got tired of reinstalling both applications every 3 weeks. I finally shelved the product.

My laptop that I got last Christmas came with Norton Internet Security and a 90 day subscription to Norton Anti-Virus. This time it was the 2005 version. I didn't bother with Norton Anti-Spam for long. I don't think anti-spam programs are very effective and you can read my strategy for dealing with spam here: http://emuelle1.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-i-deal-with-spam.html. I found Norton Internet Security to be about as painful to use as always. I had one program I liked to use that for some reason I could not get Norton to allow. Any time I tried to manually input this program into Norton's allow menu, Norton locked up and I had to force my laptop to shut down and then reboot in order to recover. Whenever I wanted to run this program, I had to manually shut Norton down. When my subscription for Norton AV ran out, I happily uninstalled the suite.

Norton lately is bitching and complaining that Microsoft won't make it easy for users to switch their security center over to Norton's. I see this as a good thing. With the pains that I've been through with Norton's 2003 and 2005 suites, trust me, you're better off with the built in security center in Windows Vista. At least Windows won't suddenly start blocking Internet Exploder for no apparent reason.

If you suddenly find a your web browser not connecting, but Windows says there is a network connection, and you have Norton installed, try shutting down Norton. Then uninstall it.