Norton - change homepage

My granddaughter has a Thinkpad R50e; quote a nice thing for her use.

It came with Norton AntiVirus 2004 pre installed. If I remember this right, one of the features was some sort of protection against viruses changing the home page of browsers?

Norton had a limited subscription, so it was un-installed and replaced with AVAST after one year or so.

Now she complains that it is not possible to choose another home (starting) page in Internet Explorer. It is not hijacked by something bad, so I guess this is not virus related, but a "feature" sticking after the un-install of Norton.

I've tried to search here and Google, but so far didn't find anything helpful.

Anyone has any ideas what to do?

 

If it is a leftover Norton feature that's the problem, try going to the Symantec website and find the support or downloads section there and look for the Norton Removal Tool (I believe that's what it's called). It's designed to scan a computer and remove stuff that a regular uninstall of Norton/Symantec leaves behind.

"Prevent changes to my hompage" tools are also found in other utility programs besides Norton/Symantec. So make sure you don't have any other utility programs installed that have a similar feature. I mention this because my own experience with uninstalling Symantec's Norton SystemWorks Professional is that while stuff does get left behind in the registry that may foul up subsequent attempts to reinstall Symantec products I haven't actually seen any working features left after an uninstall, except maybe the automatic attempt to contact the Symantec website to check for updates. Or maybe, after my uninstall, it was just reporting that I was no longer using Norton System Tools.

At any rate, after I uninstalled Norton Systemworks Professional 2004 several years ago, which included lots of stuff besides just the anti-virus software, the only thing I saw any evidence of after the uninstall was the reporting/auto contact Symantec "feature" (can't remember what it was called) and the Norton Removal Tool did zap that. But I think I still had to remove a few other remnants by hand -- a few empty folders and maybe even a couple of fragments left in the registry.

Just checked and found the Norton Removal Tool available for download at Major Geeks here:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads29.html

It's about halfway down the page. I think it will only work one time for some reason, whether you download it here or at Symantec's site. If you need to use it again you'll have to download it again. Attempting to use the same download a second time will produce a "This file/program has expired" message. But it's free and only 700K in size.

Good luck!

 

Thank you; this did work! It took some time to get my hands at the PC - but now power balance is re-established: Granddad can do what boyfriends could not :cool

 

Great! Score 1 for us old guys (I'm not a grandad, but more than old enough to be one.)