Cubelogic Improv

A few months ago I had installed Norton Antivirus 2005 (notice the corporate absurdity of the title) on Judy’s Windows ME computer (a Dell Dimension 2100, Celeron 800Mhz). She didn’t have an anti-virus solution, so I thought to adopt Norton’s. I knew it is dangerous and evil on Macs, but my idea was that it still worked okay on Windows boxes. I was wrong. Since the very first day of the installation, all sort of weird things started to happen on that once streamlined computer:

• an enormously long boot time
• boot sometimes wouldn’t complete nicely, and the machine would hang once inside Windows
• increasingly frequent BSODs (Blue Screen Of Death)
• sudden hangs, e.g. while launching Netscape
• less responsive UI
• computer won’t complete shutdown sequence (happened frequently)

Today, after another BSOD at startup, and the consequent “push-the-reboot-button”, the machine actually refused to reboot, even in safe mode. Corrupt registry. So: I took the boot disk I prepared years ago, typed scanreg /restore, thought of some prayers to the logic god, and rebooted. It did boot. Yes, and after one minute, I got another BSOD. Rebooted again. Then, while hoping the Blue devil will leave me alone for 5 minutes, I surely went to uninstall the Norton AV 2005. At the beginning of the procedure, the uninstaller nicely asked me “Do you want to completely remove NAV from this computer?”. This sounds sarcastic…. Anyway, I thought, at least it asked me. Now I know. Now I am sure that no rotten Norton cadavers will be left on my computer. Then, after the un-installation successfully completed, and after another “recommended” reboot, I logged into Windows again. Immediately, I notice the startup is still insanely long. I look at the active processes inside msconfig, and… I get very, very angry. I see 2 stupid, unrequested, undesired, spurious Norton processes. Didn’t I just completely remove the whole thing? Why, if it was not possible to remove those nasty undead cadavers, why didn’t the evil Norton un-installer warn me?!? Why?! I made an uninstaller application. I know it’s easy to warn the user if something goes wrong. Well, unless you don’t actually want to warn anybody.

Beware of Norton Antivirus. It’s a nasty evil beast. It’s in its nature.