This morning I booted my computer, and got a message saying my Norton Anti-Virus subscription had expired. This was not a surprise. A short while back, my hard drive crashed, and I reinstalled the software for the machine from the ground up including the Norton Antivirus with the 60 day subscription. So this morning it expired. I uninstalled it, and installed the Norton Anti-Virus 2005 software that I had on my machine before the crash. But Norton wouldn’t let me activate it, saying it had be installed too many times. Yeah, that kind of happens sometimes when you have computer hardware problems (You morons!).
So I uninstalled the NAV 2005, and tried to install the Norton Internet Security 2004 software that I bought a couple years ago, and never installed. I was going to leave this on my computer for now, and order NAV 2006 online. But at one point, I remember a screen where it showed what users would get what access. It showed Administrator getting administrator access. I showed my user, and think it showed administrator access, but my user, and the access level were grey out. *shrug*.
After rebooting, it got an error trying the connect to norton. I couldn’t access the net from the machine at all. I rebooted, and continued having problems. I decided to uninstall the Norton Internet Security (NIS) 2004 software. When I went to the control panel and tried to uninstall it, it said I needed to be logged into the Norton Internet Security software as administrator. I ran the software, and went to the users screen. The Log In button was greyed out, and didn’t show any users that I could log in as. I remembered the administrator thing. I booted up safe mode, and logged in as admistrator on the PC. But when I tried to run NIS 2004, it said NIS couldn’t be run from safe mode.
On my other computer, I searched for info, and found that the Administrator login doesn’t appear on the welcome screen, on in safe mode. I searched and searched for info, but didn’t find a whole lot. Norton’s website basically told me to login as Adminstrator for NIS, assuming I actually could.
I finally booted up in safe mode, and did a system restore to a couple days ago. Norton Antivirus was again installed. Norton Internet Security didn’t seem to be installed anymore. I could now access the internet again. BUT, everytime I booted the machine, I would get an error message saying that NisProd.dll was not found. It also complained about a couple other missing files, but those messages stopped after I booted the machine a couple times.
I searched for info about this NisProd.dll file, and found other people had the same problem. I decided to go to Circuit City and buy NAV 2006, and hopefully installing it would fix the problem. It didn’t.
I searched more. I found some stuff at Norton’s web site. After I follow several links, it took me to a page where I could download and run SymNRT (Norton Removal Tool):
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039?Open&docid=2004092711224136&nsf=nip.nsf&view=docid
I followed the instructions, and it uninstalled everything NORTON! It got rid of the remnants of Norton Internet Security. It got rid of the recently installed (but not yet activated) Norton Antivirus. It also got rid of Norton Ghost that has been working fine.
I rebooted, and the annoying NisProd.dll messages had gone away. I reinstalled Norton Antivirus 2006 with no problems. I reinstalled Norton Ghost also with no problems!
So if you are having these problems, use the Norton Removal Tool! It successfully wipe out all of the Norton stuff. It is a pain to reinstall stuff, but less of a pain than dealing with the problems of half-uninstalled software!

Posted by Rob in Whatever on July 29th, 2006 |