Windows 7 Internet Connection and Norton AntiVirus

willjones

New Member
I was trying to help a friend of mine setup a new computer with Windows 7 on it and everything was working great except certain sites wouldn't work. A connection error and a button saying "Diagnose Connection" would appear on sites that worked fine when accessed from a different computer. At the same time some sites would work fine but others would not. We had a trial of Norton Antivirus running by default. After struggling with the problem my friend took the computer back to Best Buy where it was purchased. There he was told by a technician that he had seen this problem many times and to solve it he uninstalls Norton and installs some other antivirus solution instead. This is what was done and sure enough the problem went away! This led me to believe maybe there was some inherent compatibility issue between Windows 7 and Norton. I visited the symantec site here and saw this...

Windows 7 Antivirus - Win 7 Virus - Norton Security Protection | Norton Is Ready to Protect Windows 7
"Norton is Ready for Windows 7
Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010 are designed from the ground up for Windows 7. The 2010 versions of our products deliver security that is both light on your system and extraordinarily effective. Norton uses the results of billions of scans on millions of computer to predict threats before they strike. Norton Internet Security and Windows 7 – they were made for each other."

Any ideas what the deal is here?

Thanks for your thoughts,
Will
 
"Norton is Ready for Windows 7
Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010 are designed from the ground up for Windows 7. The 2010 versions of our products deliver security that is both light on your system and extraordinarily effective. Norton uses the results of billions of scans on millions of computer to predict threats before they strike. Norton Internet Security and Windows 7 – they were made for each other."

Any ideas what the deal is here?

Thanks for your thoughts,
Will

Will:
I don't want to get into a discussion about Norton and its' various product lines. If I did I would have to agree with RegHakr, I personally haven't cared too much for Norton since Peter Norton faded into obscurity shortly after Symantec took the helm. I just know that I read something or other about instances of Norton Product versions of the 2009 versions getting dressed up and packaged in 2010 wrappers. I heard some say it was a mistake or error at the manufacturer and others say that it is a normal practice when new versions are close to comming out. This may have been what happened to your friend. I have experienced Norton products impacting network performance and behaviour but they are by no means alone. All I can say is that I have personally been using Microsoft Security Essentials and have found it more than satisfactory.
 
Will If you talk to any experienced senior,. member,.moderator,. you you'll see the same answer as I gave

There are many freeware free-ware solutions, .

The only aps I use on Windows is notepad on occasion and of courde Regedit.

I don't care for MSE ether the only apps I use on Windows are freeware and open source,.''I do use Notepad occasionally and of coerce Regedit.
 
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Seems like its unrelated to Norton after all...

Alright, thanks for your replies. Actually I've just found some new information. My friend called me a few minutes ago and said he just got back from Best Buy where they uninstalled Norton for him and he is still having this issue! Also, he still saw a pop-up message about Norton's auto backup software asking if he wanted to start his trial. After this I directed him to go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall that. It now seems that Norton isn't running anything. We went to the Task Manager and took a look at running processes and didn't see anything that looked Norton related. Unfortunately though we are still seeing this problem. I had him open IE8 and delete all cached files and cookies and try again, facebook.com came right up because that was his home page, but then when we tried one of the sites that was failing again it still didn't work. I also told him to install Google Chrome or Mozilla FireFox and see if the same thing happened in those browsers. It did. Right now I only know of two sites where we have seen this happen, but there are probably others too. I tried navigating to The Moray Homepage - Welcome and also to Link Removed due to 404 Error but both of these sites indicate that there is an internet connection problem of some kind. I had my friend type in www.hfasdtasasdfp.com to try going to a site that he knew didn't exist and see if it showed the same error message or not. It didn't. It brought up a Yahoo search screen saying that site wasn't found. Since this problem didn't happen when he took the computer in to Best Buy, but it did when he took it home and since Norton seems to be uninstalled, what could be the matter? I asked my friend if he ever saw it not working while at Best Buy. He said no. So apparently he uninstalled Norton and it worked. But it may be that he could have just tried it immediately and it would have worked. The odd thing is my friend has another laptop with Windows XP on it and these sites work just fine there. (He is also seeing some funny activity with a Weather Control widget they have installed, not sure if it is having problems for the same reason or not.) Is this possibly router related? I am really confused and not sure how to advise my friend. He doesn't really want to hire someone to fix his brand new computer! The warranty allowed the Best Buy man to service it without any charge, but the computer still doesn't work at his house.

Thanks for anymore thoughts...
-Will
 
Will, take a look at the post by RegHakr, he sent links to the Norton Removal Tool, which you really need to run, as well as a second one which may help as well. And of course reboot the machine after you run Norton Removal
 
Will I forgot to mention....tell your friend to launch a command prompt and try typing "ipconfig /flushdns" without the quotes. We might want to take a look at the host files on his local machine to make sure there are no entrys in there with respect to the sites that he's having trouble with. He may also want to join this forum and get some answers directly provided of course his machine will resolve this URL
 
Finally resolved...

My friend ended up calling his Internet Service Provider and tried to find out what might be the matter. They didn't really know but suggested they try resetting his IP to a different one. After doing this he was able to access everything just fine! Thanks...
 
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