PLEASE HELP! Problems Uninstalling Norton AntiVirus 2005

OMG! Oh, first, let me say hello to everyone here & thanks in advance for any advice...I am absolutely DISGUSTED with Norton AntiVirus.

Just a bit of history here first - My laptop (God rest its soul) crashed a few months ago & we recently purchased a new desktop computer. On my laptop I used eAcceleration StopSign for our virus/firewall protection, and let me just tell you, I LOVED THEM! I don't know if anyone here is familiar with them or not, but I have nothing but praise for them & have now used them for about a year - they've seriously helped me through some major virus related issues and they are exceptionally affordable. You can check them out HERE.

Anyway...on to the meat & potatoes here. When we purchased our new system (Dell system with Windows XP) it came loaded with a Norton AntiVirus package that included a free trial, yadayadayada. I knew that I could transfer my eAcceleration account over to the new system, but just didn't do it right away since I knew we had virus protection (HA! Is that what Norton calls it?!?) on the computer. We used Norton for about a month, religiously performing live updates on a regular basis & scanning our system regularly. Yesterday afternoon, my hubby was surfing the web, minding his own business and was attacked by a FakeAlert thingamabobby that basically took over the system. Homepage Hijacker included. So he ran a scan. Nothing. Ran a live update, then another scan. Still nothing. I knew better. SOOOO....I went out to my control panel and proceeded to uninstall Norton. The first time I attempted it, the system seemed to freeze up & would never complete the uninstall.

I tried it a second time, this time around it seemed to work. I went back in to my control panel & made sure that I removed everything (that I'm aware of, at least) that has any relationship to Symantec/Norton. Then I transferred my eAcceleration membership, ran a scan with their threat cleaner, and VOILA`! There they were - two FakeAlerts, a trojan downloader, & a Beagle.netsky (or something like that). The threat scanner cleaned the system up, even reclaimed my desktop background for me, & all seemed well. Wellllll.....was I wrong. I went out to also make sure that I installed eAcceleration's firewall. It would go through the motions, then when it reached the end of its download, I'd get an error message telling me that Norton/Symantec Personal Firewall was still running & that I should NOT continue with the download of the new firewall until the Norton one was gone as it could create serious network/system issues.

I went back through my system & checked everything I know to check to make sure everything was gone, & couldn't find anything else. So, I emailed eAcceleration - they told me that unfortunately Norton DOES NOT uninstall cleanly & contact Norton support for help in clearing up the issue. Well, anyone who's tried to navigate Norton's "support" system can probably understand my overwhelming urge to saw at my own wrists with a dull knife...

After much searching, I thought I'd found the Holy Grail - SysNRT! Aha! But what a cruel cruel joke it was. I clicked the link, followed the instructions in the next two dialog boxes that popped up, then WHAM! An error message telling me that it wasn't an acceptable Win program - or some such thing. So, I followed the instructions detailing what to do if you recieved an error (though there wasn't an error listed that was quite like mine) and still nothing.

Somebody out there please help me!! I am begging on bended knee...right now I am ready to strangle whoever developed this software.

Sorry for the novel - thanks for taking the time to read it all!

 

You could try going into services and disabling anything Norton related there.