How to disable Norton Systemworks?

You go to the Windows Services screen and shutdown the Norton service. You use MSconfig in the Run Box, you go to the Start-up tab, and you uncheck anything that looks like Norton.

BlackICE is NOT disabled by exiting from the monitoring utility. You must first right-click on "Stop BlackICE Engine". You may have to do this a couple of times. You will know the engine has been disabled when you see a red slash over the BlackICE icon in the System Tray. Only then should you exit from the monitoring utility. This is sometimes necessary when running defragger or disk repair utilities, especially under W98SE.

BlackICE is probably NOT causing your problem, but check your BlackICE "Advanced Firewall Settings" to see whether or not it is allowing communications over the ports required by your wireless printer. You are on the right track in thinking it wise to temporarily disable BlackICE while trouble shooting.

I like BlackICE. It has some quirks, but is generally reliable and effective and has caused me few problems. BlackICE seems to work differently than most other firewalls. It co-exists nicely with other firewalls, though other firewalls always caution against running a second firewall.

Also check your router, if you are using one. It may be blocking wireless printer and file sharing by default.

Symantec Norton products have become a disaster the past couple of years. They install lots of resident modules to check that you have a current license, then fail to uninstall these modules when you decide to uninstall the program. After uninstalling a Symantec Norton program you may have hundreds of abandoned registry entries to clean out manually. The odds are good that you will never identify and remove all the garbage.

You will probably also have junk left in your "Program Files" and "Common Files" folders after uninstalling Symantec stuff.

Many computer repair technicians complain that Symantec software is responsible for many of the problems their customers cannot solve.

Survivor @ Ground.Zero

I've been using it for a couple of years now and had no rela problems either.

I'm also the (not quite so proud as I've had a lot of trouble with it) owner of a newish MacBook Pro and that was a cinch to hook up to the printer and I've been using that over the holidays. I'll have another go at the Windows machine when I feel up to it - I have a very short fuse with ill-behaved technology ;-)

I'm reaching the point where I might give up on MS - my Windows laptop needs to be upgraded to run Vista and this nonsense with Norton is tipping the scales.

I've been a user of Norton Utilities since pre-Windows days and have used their security products for several years now but they are getting beyond a joke. Consecutive versions have decreased user control to the point where - witness this thread - you can't even just switch the damn thing off any more. Apart from adware, the only virus I ever got was harmless and Black Ice does a good job keeping intruders out so I probably don't need always on protection. In fact I know I don't - dodgy emails are either deleted by the spam filter or me so I'll give a lot of thought to renewing my licence in a few months time. Let's face it, most of NU is now standard in the main OSes and with the cost of storage nowadays who really needs to be diagnosing disks and curing problems?

Cheers and thanks both for the suggestions

UD

EVERY computer needs to be upgraded to run Vista and probably most should NOT be "upgraded"!

Why do you feel you must run Vista? I wouldn't bother "upgrading" to what will surely be a slower operating system. Besides, every new Microsoft OS has been full of serious bugs. If there is something that Vista offers that you must have, then WAIT until Vista SP-1 is released!

Most likely you can get most of Vista's functionality by adding your own third-party utilities to enhance WinXP's security and graphics functions. You are already doing that by running BlackICE under WinXP!

It's not the same people or the same company. Peter Norton left a long time ago.

Don't become manic. NTFS-formatted disks are much more resistant to corruption than FAT and FAT32, but problems do develop with the various indices that NTFS maintains. That's why you still need a program to identify problems that might cause performance problems or data loss. (Most of these utilities seem to rely upon WinXP's chkdsk to actually correct problems "off-line", that is, during a reboot. If you are disciplined, you could learn to routinely initiate chkdsk, perhaps once or twice per month. Prior to NTFS, Norton Disk Doctor and the other disk repair utilities mostly corrected software problems. There are only a rare few utilities, notably Gibson's Spinrite, which actually corrected hardware corruption by recovering data bits and rewriting them to a reformatted sector.

As for viruses and trojans, you've either been lucky or have limited your activities to safer ones.

For many years I never ran real time anti-virus protection, because my out-of-date hardware was too slow to handle the overhead. I got along fine by downloading everything into one folder, then scanning it manually with a half dozen different anti-virus scanners. Eventually I decided that a program that used Kaspersky Labs' anti-virus signatures was all I really needed, since Kaspersky Labs was identifying malware before their competitors, sometimes weeks or months before.

Despite my caution, I was hit by viruses twice; one virus had just been released. It corrupted a lot of files on my boot drive, but none on other volumes. So I learned that real safety requires patience; that is, it's wise to age downloads before playing with them, so the anti-virus vendors have time to receive reports. I have personally reported over 30 new trojan-dropper variations to Kaspersky, written by one psychotic Usenet miscreant whose handiwork I have come to recognize. I didn't bother submitting any of these to other vendors.

Trojan writers have become more sophisticated, so I now run real-time protection (I junked the slowest machine). I think it's become a necessity. You need to be particularly careful with password-protected archives, since the passwords can prevent anti-virus programs from scanning them. However, a real-time scanner should identify the malware as it is extracted. (You should manually scan your entire hard disk after receiving a notification from your anti-virus program, the trojan-dropper may have already dropped it's payload!)

Whether or not you are at risk largely depends upon where you fish; Usenet newsgroups are very polluted waters.

I strongly recommend you just dump the Symantec stuff, carefully remove any remnants, then try to solve your wireless networking problem. Afterwards install either a Kaspersky or AVG product alongside BlackICE. I've looked at AVG freeware only quickly. It seems to do a reasonably good job, though it misses some adware and spyware that Kaspersky identifies.

Good luck to you!

Survivor @ Ground.Zero