Ok, I recently upgraded the Norton AntiVirus client on the XP box to 2003. I did this about, o say, 3 weeks ago. Everything ran smooth-like and I went on a short vacation last week. Upon returning, I powered up the machine and was welcomed to an unexplainable and generic error message from Norton telling me it "couldn't verify if it was properly installed" and gave an error code. I checked the Symantec site and found nothing. As far as I could tell, NAV was running just fine, Autoprotect, scan functionality, etc.
It was then that I noticed I no longer was able to install anything. Any setup utilities using Installshield would return an odd error of "Setup cannot be completed: Cannot find the specified module". It was at this point I checked with Installshields site and again found nothing to help solve the issue. I chalked it up as bad MS programming and that somehow XP had gone sour.
I noticed yet another problem at this time however. Internet Exploder (ahem), Explorer, could no longer be launched by other applications. It would launch manually, but nothing could call on it. Also, it could no longer launch hyperlinks on web pages running any Javascript. Even the Windows Update utility in the start menu would do nothing. AGain, I searched Microsoft's site this time, and again nothing explaining it.
Before I threw in the towel and reloaded XP, I decided to uninstall Norton AV 2003 for the hell of it. I was going to reload the machine anyhow, so what would it hurt. After I uninstalled, everything worked just fine.
I am still in awe as to how Norton could be linked to all those problems yet still not return any errors in the Event Viewer, its own logs or anywhere else. And I am riddled in the same way of how the other applications return no errors anywhere either. Now I am not a professional programmer, but I know enough to get by. My best guess on how all that got screwed up by Norton is that a common file of sorts was currupted by Norton somehow and just killed everything.
Just posting this in case anyone else might run into the same problem. I seem to come across the weird ones.
Maybe if I stopped fiddling with things that wouldnt be the case, hehe.
