Problems with XP and Norton Internet Security

[hmmhighlander]

I have used Norton Internet Security for many years and am running NIS 2002 on my old PC. I have also recently installed NIS 2004 on both my Brothers' PCs with no problems. However I have just built a new PC for myself with:

Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard
Athlon XP2800+
512 Mb Crucial 3200 DDR RAM
Fightech Radeon 9600XT video card
Maxtor 6Y080M0 Plus 9 80Gb Serial ATA HDD
Windows XP Home (+ SP1) and DX9.0b
400Watt PSU

This PC has been running completely stably for a week (It has not been overclocked in any way). I have run many benchmarks (3dMark 2000, 2001, 2003 and Aquamark on it and achieved excellent results. I have also run MemTest to check the memory and the CPU runs at a temperature of 47 to 50. I have used it to play games constantly over this period with no problems.

Everything was fine till I wanted to connect to the Internet with this PC and so I installed Norton Internet Security 2003 that came bundled with the motherboard. It appeared to install ok, but during the 1st re-boot it would not boot up, so I had to go back to my last working configuration. I had a copy of NIS 2002 that I use on my other PC so I decided to try that. It had no problems - I was able to install it ok, and so I assumed there was a problem with the bundled software.

Rather than wait for a new copy of this I just decided to buy NIS 2004. When that arrived I installed it (apparently successfully), but on the 1st reboot this time it brought up the XP desktop very briefly but then crashed within a couple of seconds and went into re-boot mode again. This loop continued and teh only way out was to interupt it with F8 and choose to revert back to last working configuration.

I have tried installing and uninstalling repeatedly, disabling XPs firewall and downloading all XP updates with no success . The same thing happens every time. NIS 2002 installs successfully, 2003 and 2004 won't install. Beacause of this I can't use my broadband connection on this PC.

Norton's support seems non existant - I see lots of complaints about 2004 on various review sites but there is no mention of any problems on Norton's site and no way of contacting their technical support.

The only 2 things I can think are different between my PC and my Brothers' PCs is that I am using a Serial ATA HDD while they are using IDE and I am using NTFS and they are using FAT32 file systems.

I am totally beaten by this one - can anyone help?
Thanks,

Harry

 

[EeyoreX]

I don't have any trouble with NIS 2004 on my machine. You may have to try this. It is a removal tool for NIS 2003 that removes some entries that may cause problems after uninstall.

\Dan

 

[hmmhighlander]

Tried a few more things and can now say for sure that the problem is not related to NAV but some other component in NIS.

I Changed my BIOS settings to disable Onboard LAN chip and Onboard RAID (not really expecting this to make a difference.
I made sure my XP Firewall was completely disabled.
I manually deleted lots of 'Norton', 'Symantec' and 'Liveupdate' entries left in the registry and ran both SYMCLN and RNAV utilities (available on Symantec's site).

I then tried installing NIS2004 again but this time choosing not to install NAV.

The same thing happened and I had to restore from the checkpoint I created before the install.

I guess I'll just have to buy another product like McCafee or Zone alarm and hope that works for me.

PS any way to install NAV alone from a NIS disk?

Thanks,

Harry

 

[hmmhighlander]

By the way when the XP reboot crashes it does so with the message

"driver_IRQL_not_less_or_equal"

I don't suppose this means anything to anyone?

Thanks,

Harry

 

[Erasmus-X]

PS any way to install NAV alone from a NIS disk?

Yes. There's a folder on the NIS disc labeled "NAV" that contains the setup executable for Norton Antivirus.

 

[hmmhighlander]

Unfortunately when I try to execute the Nav application directly it aborts with the message that

"This MSI must be launched through setup".

Thanks anyway.

Can't beleive this has caused so many problems, because I've always been a big fan of Symantec/Norton products' ease of use. However, what is really bugging me now is the fact that Symantec seem to deliberately make it more or less impossible for individuals to get technical advice from them. they claim that 90% resolve their problems by means of their automated knowledgebase, but it appears to me that they are completely abandoning the 10% that constitute potentially 'difficult' problems.

Any suggestions about other Integrated Security suites - I notice Mcafee still seems to have a rela l'live' technical help desk to which you can email problems. Any good or bad experiences with them?

 

[boomerang]

driver_IRQL_not_less_or_equal

 

[EeyoreX]

You didn't mention if you tried the NIS removal tool I linked for you. I used it to completely remove my NIS 2003 when it caused some trouble with my 2004 install.

\Dan

 

[hmmhighlander]

Thanks for this Boomerang.

I should have checked the MS Knowledgebase myself.

It is possibleappears that the very 1st entry here might identify the cause of my problem. Microsoft suggests that this problem occurs if more than one Mylex RAID controller that is supported by the Dac2w2k.sys driver is installed on the computer.

When I check my Registry I appear to have 3 ControlSets that use this driver (SCSI Miniport), and SATA drives are treated as SCSI. I will contact both Gigabyte and Mylex to ask for advice.

However, I am puzzled as to why (if this is the cause of the problem) the PC functions perfectly until I install NIS 2003 or 2004 at which point it experiences these problems and will not boot up.