AboutCarolyn Meinel Expertise I cover Windows, Unix, TCP/IP and Ethernet security questions. I do not cover Mac, Palm Pilot, or other networking issues.
Experience Books by Carolyn Meinel: wrote a chapter for The Hacking of America book (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567204600/happyhacker)
My article Code Red for the Web for Scientific American was reprinted in the book Best American Science Writing 2002 (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060936509/happyhacker). My book The Happy Hacker: A Guide to Mostly Harmless Hacking is now in 4th edition with a Japanese edition (see http://happyhacker.org/hhbook/).
Question My extremely sluggish virus-infected PC won't cooperate. I bought Norton 360, but can't get it to install. Screen said that I have to uninstall Norton 2005. I said O.K. - 24 hours later, the uninstall attempt was still running. This computer takes 4 or 5 hours to re-boot. Also, it is very difficult to access the Symantec web sites for removal help. Is there any hope? Thanks. Larry
Answer It sounds like your computer is infected by something that is designed to make it impossible to uninstall Norton. The solution is to use a different antivirus program to clean out this destructive infection. Here are two free antivirus programs that might solve the problem: Avast! from http://www.avast.com or AVG, free from http://free.grisoft.com
If possible, you should disable Norton 2005 before running either of these programs, as you can only run one antivirus program at a time. Otherwise they fight each other over any virus they find and this can crash your computer. You should be able to bring up a control panel for Norton from Start --> All Programs and use it to disable it temporarily. If this doesn't work, you can try to run your new antivirus without disabling Norton because it may turn out that Norton doesn't even detect the virus(es) detected by these other programs. This normally wouldn't happen. But your copy of Norton may be so badly damaged that it won't even try to detect viruses any more.
If none of this works, please let me know and I'll show you how to solve any virus problem. The trouble with this ultimate solution (we call it "nuking") is that it is a huge bunch of work and I don't want to put you through that unless it is absolutely necessary.
