I've been having a hell of a time, and this isn't asking for technical support, so it belongs here dammit. (Though if you have some wonderful insight, I would greatly appreciate it.)

Life is grand when everything works. However today, PAL9000 (my computer -- named so LONG before I discovered Real Life Comics --) decided to get crappy with me. First, something caused NAV to disable Auto Protect, but still think it was working. So it would automatically download updates and such, but it sure as hell wasn't catching the trojan that I got while scanning over an old drive that I KNEW was infected. I was curious to see if I had any old games on there that I didn't have discs for anymore...

So while I'm at Best Buy today (working, of course) I decide to pick up one of our chumbo (comes in a sleeve, not in a box) versions of Norton Antivirus 2005 (because they usually carry a hefty discount, in this case, I was right. $19.99). I get home after work and decide to install it. I dilligently uninstall the misbehaving antivirus software, restart, connect to the net, do a Trend Micro scan and come up clean. I then go about installing the new copy of NAV and seem to be successful. It wants to restart.

After the restart, the program wants to activate itself. I go through and click the activate button, and it warns me to connect to the internet. Because SBC sucks, I'm still on dialup, so I ablige and connect. My connection is up and running, and I'm capable of browsing web-pages (I tested before going back to NAV to be sure it would actually work for activation). So once again I click the next button associated with the activate function, only this time, my cursor turns to an hourglass and remains that way.

At work I've seen this program activate a billion times. You click next, it changes screens, and then it's done as long as NAV can actually talk to the internet. However on my machine, it decides to sit there. I figure, "Meh... I've never done it on dialup before. Probably takes longer." So I leave to take a shower. When I return about an hour later, the screen has not budged. And there is NO network activity.

A collegue of mine has a superstition that Service Pack 2 is the root of all evil, and specifically that NAV2005 does not install properly when SP2 has been installed beforehand. I had never witnessed said problem, but I for some reason came to the conclusion that it must be valid in some cases, and that with my crappy luck, it happened to be valid in mine.

Rather than going through the hard process of uninstalling a service pack (which is a HUGE pain in the *** no matter how easy they say they've made it). So instead, I weigh my other option against that, which is to format C: and reinstall Windows XP. Easy decision... No thought, vs. doing work at home (I'm a lead technician for what's now called Geek Squad). Away I went.

Happily, I plugged in the diagnostic CD that I wrote for work into the CD drive and rebooted the system. The menu pops up and I select to use it as a 98 boot disc. It loads and I use FDISK to wipe out the partition. Reboot. Pop in the XP cd. Reboot. Start installation of XP on the unpartitioned space.

Windows is installed, but what the hell is this? The drive letters are screwy! Why the hell is F: now C: and why is C: H:? HOLY CRAP! IT WON'T LET YOU JUST CHANGE THE FREAKING DRIVE LETTER OF THE SYSTEM DRIVE!? WHY ON EARTH WOULD THEY DO SOMETHING STUPID LIKE THAT!?

Regedit -> LocalMachine -> System -> Mounted devices -> H:\ renamed to C:\

Reboot.

WILL NOT START WINDOWS!

Restart Windows XP installation so that it will reload Windows onto hopefully C: this time.

SUCCESS!

So let's leave SP2 off and install NAV2005. Seems to be successful again. Reboot. Try to activate...

FAILURE... It freezes again... Great...

So I just reformatted my system and have wasted hours of time because Symantec released a bad batch of CDs and has yet to put up an online form as they have in the past.

The stab in the back, because I normally don't mind a good reformat... I forgot to back up my emails once again. So alot of OSC's important documents are gone... Well crap.

So to Symantec... I say, "**** YOU!!"

AVG is your friend mon ami.

I'm thinking of ditching Symantec for Kaspersky Anti-vierus the next time I upgrade, b/c i heard its way better. Has anyone heard anything good or bad about this program?

Good god, get ****ing AVG, man.

Symantec sucks. Trend Micro wins.

AVG is worthless. Trend Micro is king.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!


.....

Okay I'm over i...

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

...No seriously this time..


AHHHHHHH *snipe*

Service Pack 2 is the root of all evil. It screwed my computer up so dang bad that i dunno what to do. I remove SP 2 , and it works fine. No pressure. I've heard that Norton anti 2005 sucks to high heaven, but I know that 2004 is just fine. Geez.

Good to know I should stay far away from SP2 if I ever decide to upgrade Hal.

I have no comment on the Symantec stuff. I've said my peace on them over and over again.

Agreed. I reformated my computer back when school started, and installed AVG instead of NAV just for a kick, to see if it caused less of a slowdown when installing programs (NAV can really slow down an installation process, and I don't like turning it off when the program I am installed came from the Internet).

Needless to say, AVG never picked up a couple viruses I got when visiting a *BEWARE* site that distributes *OMG* cd-keys. I hadn't installed Firefox yet, and they installed themselves through IE (I could see "Installing something.dll" in the status bar). I KNEW something was there, yet AVG never gave me anything. And then when I tried to uninstall it, it was giving me some kind of 16-bit sub-system error. WTF, I thought 16-bit was left behind in the days of Windows 3.1 and 95, 98 at the latest.

After booting into safe mode and manually uninstalling AVG, I was finally able to install NAV and get rid of the virii, pretty effortlessly.

Grisoft can munch on my ***.

Hell no. Some of us still use old Windows 3.1 programs, and even *gasp* DOS programs!

And FYI, Longhorn will still have support for it all. Nyah! :p

Hell, I still use old dos programs. But an UP-TO-DATE anti-virus program was giving me 16-bit system errors.

Store your data on separate partitions. Use ERUNT to back up your Registry every time you log on to Windows (shortcut in StartUp group). Set up at least two primary partitions, and install Windows on both of them. If one installation becomes unbootable, boot into the other one and use ERUNT to restore the Registry to the other installation, or in a WCS, use it to back up any data on the system partition before deleting the partition and reinstalling Windows.

Just a few things that have helped save me in Windows crises over the years. Hope it helps somehow.

From your comment "I turned up the settinsg 1600x1200 I won so easily" in a different thread, I wouldn't trust you.

Anyways, SP2 ran just dandy with my Norton 2004 and 2005. In fact, I haven't had one single probelm with SP2. No new errors, HD errors, Windows errors etc, which leads me to believe (not in all cases), that it's the users fault for doing something wrong previously, taking bad care of their computer, or doing something wrong during the installation. However, I took the oppurtunity to switch to Trend Micro PC-Cillen 2005 (I'm a beta tester, so I test it, and I get a free one year license one the test is over). I like Trend Micro a LOT better. It's not as "I bug you" as Norton or McAfee.

And as always, I'll speak as the true selfish American I am,, as long as MY computer works, I could care less about anyone elses problems with theirs :p.

Your king of AVs couldn't fully clean couple of laptops from viruses @ the student help desk (my job). Some could not be deleted in one pass. I remember doing multiple passes on these laptops and the network was still kicking them off b/c they were still infected. Of course the clear thinking me did NOT bother to download AVG and install it on the forementioned laptops.

+2 for stupidity

Buck--loads of people have been having massive problems with SP2, my friend does and he knows more about computers than both of us combined. It's not user-error.

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