Firewall Problems

[Chris LeFebvre]

A friend gave me their Vista notebook (running home basic) and they
were having a host of problems most of which I've managed to fix however
I'm stuck on this one.

They had Norton Internet Security 2007 installed and it was really
causing more problems than it was solving so I tried to uninstall it and
the uninstaller wouldn't finish and Norton's removal tool (the latest
downloaded from their website) appears to be broken since it keeps
saying that it's expired and won't do anything. So following some
instructions I found I manually removed the Norton Program directories
and registry entries and reset the winsock lsp settings with "netsh
winsock reset". However the Security Center now shows that the Firewall
is on but when I go to Control Panel / Windows Firewall it says that the
Firewall is off.

The problem is that despite having done all this any program other
than Internet Explorer that needs internet access is being blocked.
Spybot Search & Destroy is being blocked from downloading updates,
FireFox can't access the internet, NOD32 is being blocked from download
signature updates, etc.

Does anyone have any idea what I can do to fix this problem?

Thanks,

- Chris

 

[Chris LeFebvre]

I opened a command prompt as "administrator" and did as you said, sfc
got to 27% and then returned this error: "Windows Resource Protection
could not perform the requested operation". Doing a little Googling, I
saw a suggestion to try the same in Safe Mode, unfortunately the results
were the same. The same thread seemed to indicate that there could be a
problem with the hard drive and to run a check disk, I did including
checking the drive for bad blocks. Checkdsk found some bad clusters in
these files and "repaired" them:
\windows\system32\nvoglv32.dll
\progra~1\common~1\aol\acs\US\acsui.bk4
\Windows\Fonts\simfang.ttf

there may have been more but since it was 2am and still running I had to
leave it unattended (and get some sleep) and in the morning it
apparently finished and rebooted and if there were more I can't seem to
find the log file with the complete chkdsk results.

Once the hard drive was repaired and I rebooted and retried the sfc
/scannow (both in normal and safe mode) it's now getting to 98% and
saying "Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable
to fix some of them". I checked the cbs.log file and despite the message
on the command line the last lines seem to indicate that it finished
successfully, the log file is very long and I paged through some of it
but I can't seem to find any errors or instances where sfc failed to
repair a problem.

I've checked the Security Center again and it still says that "Norton
Internet Security is currently turned on" while Windows Firewall says
that it's off. I've tried again to download and use the Norton Removal
Tool with the same results as before. Any advice on how to get rid of
this blasted Norton Firewall?

Thanks,

- Chris

 

[Chris LeFebvre]

Okay, that was about a forty minute exercise in patience. I searched
for all "Symantec" and "Norton" references and got rid of everthing I
could find and the normal firewall operations have been restored.

Thanks,

- Chris