Installed FireFox 4.0, now should I enable googleupdater?

I'm running Vista with all updates, and am using Norton 2011 and Norton firewall.

I have had a series of "Medium" (yellow) alerts from Norton that point to googleupdate.exe in c:\program files\google\update\googleupdate.exe where Norton says "Unauthorized access blocked (Open Process Token)".

There is also one referring to "Unauthorized access blocked (Access Thread Data)" and this one points to c:\windows\system32\services.exe.

I've just recently updated to Firefox 4.0 and this has automatically disabled the Google Toolbar for Firefox 2.1.20060807W which they say is incompatible with the 4.0 version. It is greyed out and probably not a terrible loss. What is a loss is that I no longer see the red/yellow/green indicators from Norton IPS to tell me whether a web site returned in a Google search is safe or not (although Norton IPS 2.0 shows up in my Firefox extensions and is not disabled).

But also, under Plugins, I see that there is a Google Updater 2.4.1908.5032 which is disabled. It seems it would be possible to enable this plugin, as there is an "Enable" button that is not greyed out. I couldn't remember if I might have read something cautioning against letting googleupdater run automatically, and anyway in the last couple days I had been having some issues so I didn't want to do anything stupid and I have not enabled it.

Those issues? The computer refused to shut down night before last and I left it running with "Shutting down" displayed and the cursor going endlessly around. I thought maybe Windows was finishing up some kind of install. But in the morning I still had the same "Shutting down" screen so I had to do an interrupt to kill it. When it came back up the cursor was jumping all around on me, so I did a System Restore to set myself back a few days because I had been doing a lot of surfing and was nervous I had picked something up.

When it rebooted I now got a warning (from Windows I think) that my anti-virus protection had been turned off. I also got a message from Norton that I was at risk and needed to download virus definitions. When I did this it seemed to download everything from the start of time, but when it was finished Norton seemed happy and showed me all green. My Security Center also showed me all green lights.

This morning on bootup it proceeded immediately to run a CHKDSK, telling me that it was deleting a couple of index entries. After that it seemed to boot normally.

So. The computer is working. All my security programs ran successfully and I came up clean (besides Norton, I manually run Malwarebytes and SuperAntispyware, Spybot Search & Destroy and Spyware Blaster).

Questions:

Does anyone have an opinion whether I should enable the googleupdater? My Norton history still seems to be saying that googleupdate is constantly knocking on the door but can't get through.

Does anyone have a suspicion that I might still be dealing with malware and should be in another forum? (It's only now that I'm recalling chaslang telling me that performing a restore does not necessarily remove malware.)

Thanks very much. Always appreciate the ear.

Janet

 

you can safely disable the Google Updater Service in the windows services,go to Start
>Run: Services.msc
>scroll down to Google Updater Service
>Right click
>Properties
>change from automatic to disable
>reboot
it's not necessary to have it running as a service, and its an intrusive resource hog as well that may cause issues with intrusion detection on certain security Apps,you can always update google programs manually,but after updating you may have to disable the updater again because certain google updates re-enable it when they're being installed

 

Great answer, very easy to follow, thank you so much, pistol!