Emie writes:

<<I believe Norton or Symantec is practically holding this PC a hostage.   How
can Symantec/NORTON expects PC owners to reload their *&^%#$!! antivirus
program if this same program shutsdown the System and prevents Windows from
starting up?>>

Seems to me that the first thing to do is remove Nortons from the startup
chain. I've never used it, but I recall that when I used to have McAfee, it
got its startup instructions from autoexec.bat. Maybe NAV does the same.

Try booting into dos, either from boot menu of boot floppy, and see if
there's an autoexec.bat in C. If so, disable it (rename), then try
rebooting into Windows.

Otherwise, or perhaps as well as, the NAV startup instructions are in the
registry. Maybe you could use dos to get into the registry and remove the
run lines? Dunno whether that's possible in ME, I guess it depends how much
dos experience you have.

Can you get to the boot menu? If you could boot into Safe Mode, you should
be able to access the registry and disable NAV. Maybe NAV protects itself
against such nefarious activity---I imagine that's more or less how a virus
would try to disable it, so it may be clever enough to thwart you.

I wonder if you could avoid the reformat if you:
1. In dos, save a copy of User.dat and System.dat.(I assume ME still uses
those as its registry files.) Also save a copy of the Windows System
folder. Optionally, save anything else useful in the Windows umbrella (eg
the Desktop folder, Sendto folder if that's been configured, Start Menu, etc).
2. Deltree Windows
3. Reinstall Windows. Now you should have a clean registry.
4. Find a way of editing the old User.dat and System.dat so that you can
remove any Run lines for NAV. (Don't ask me how to do that--I'm not sure
now whether they will open directly in Notepad).
5. In dos, replace the new registry files with the old ones, which
hopefully will no longer contain the NAV run lines.
6. Now you should be able to avoid reinstalling most of the software, as
the registry will still retain all software entries.
7. There will probably be a few missing .Dll's and drivers, which you can
easily replace as necessary from the saved System folder.
8. Replace any of the above folders you saved---this saves a lot of later
configuring.

Just a thought for having fun on a rainy day, may be worth trying if you
really want to avoid a reformat/reinstalling everything; eg if the client
does not have all software installation files.

I hope someone has an easier solution. Good luck.

Don Penlington



 From the beach at Surfers Paradise.
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