B
Bill Gribble
My disillusionment with Symantec grows.
But that aside....
I'm running Win XP Home Edition. Had a run-in with a variety of worms
and other pieces of malware of late that have now all been purged from
the system. Nothing remains to suggest that it isn't an entirely patched
and up to date, clean setup of XP.
I have 5 Windows user accounts. Mine (Supervisor), and four others,
essentially shared between my wife and three kids. They are all Limited
user accounts (for good reason!), which is, in part, the entire point of
them having separate accounts to me and the entire point of me moving to
XP in the first place.
To describe what is happening, I'll take it from the point of a fresh
installation of Norton (I've now Installed/Uninstalled a number of times
to try and get this working). Norton Internet Security 2004 (NIS)
installs fine. I then log in as me, the installation completes and NIS
runs sweet as a nut. We update to all the latest versions via the
symantec Live Update. A site like http://grc.com reports my Internet
connection is in total stealth mode, nothing can get in, all is as I'd
like.
Restart the machine.
This time I log in as one of the Limited accounts. Any one, it doesn't
appear to matter.
Now Norton Antivirus starts up and runs fine. But the Firewall side of
NIS fails to load. Try and start it from the Start Menu and a dialogue
box comes up saying "Driver Initialization failed (5004, 115)" ...
A security scan from the Internet (courtesy of grc.com, for example)
indicates I have NO FIREWALL IN PLACE AT ALL. No stealth, and port 135
(ARGH!) is totally open. Not good at all.
The only "support" apparently available from Symantec, despite my
parting with hard-earned cash to buy their poxy software is their online
automated support, that tells me this specific error message is due to
the presence of another firewall or the interference of malware.
Which I know is untrue. The machine is clean. I've put days of work in
to getting it clean. NIS works on the Supervisor account.
And I don't have another firewall set up. And it seems grc.com agrees
with me on this because it reports that my machine is laid wide open to
the web. More over, if I change the user's account type that I've just
logged in as to a Supervisor account, restart the machine and log back
in, NIS starts up exactly as it should. If this user specifically was
somehow infected with malware or had an independent firewall running I
would get the same error. But I don't. NIS works, and the only thing
that has changed are the account privileges of the user account that has
logged in and needs the protection it is supposed to provide.
So it seems very apparent that some aspect of NIS is failing to load
because of the restricted privileges of a limited Windows account.
Whereas it is in fact the users using the limited accounts on my machine
that I'm principally concerned with!
So it seems very apparent that the Symantec automated support is wrong.
I can't find any reference to phone support that seems relevant to
setting up their software, only "virus incident support" that appears to
cost almost as much "per incident" as the software did in the first
place. I can't even find an email address for their support desk (do
they even have a support desk)?
Is it me, or have I been conned? Short of that, has anybody else got any
suggestions as to how I could get NIS working on the Limited user
accounts on my machine?
-Bill
But that aside....
I'm running Win XP Home Edition. Had a run-in with a variety of worms
and other pieces of malware of late that have now all been purged from
the system. Nothing remains to suggest that it isn't an entirely patched
and up to date, clean setup of XP.
I have 5 Windows user accounts. Mine (Supervisor), and four others,
essentially shared between my wife and three kids. They are all Limited
user accounts (for good reason!), which is, in part, the entire point of
them having separate accounts to me and the entire point of me moving to
XP in the first place.
To describe what is happening, I'll take it from the point of a fresh
installation of Norton (I've now Installed/Uninstalled a number of times
to try and get this working). Norton Internet Security 2004 (NIS)
installs fine. I then log in as me, the installation completes and NIS
runs sweet as a nut. We update to all the latest versions via the
symantec Live Update. A site like http://grc.com reports my Internet
connection is in total stealth mode, nothing can get in, all is as I'd
like.
Restart the machine.
This time I log in as one of the Limited accounts. Any one, it doesn't
appear to matter.
Now Norton Antivirus starts up and runs fine. But the Firewall side of
NIS fails to load. Try and start it from the Start Menu and a dialogue
box comes up saying "Driver Initialization failed (5004, 115)" ...
A security scan from the Internet (courtesy of grc.com, for example)
indicates I have NO FIREWALL IN PLACE AT ALL. No stealth, and port 135
(ARGH!) is totally open. Not good at all.
The only "support" apparently available from Symantec, despite my
parting with hard-earned cash to buy their poxy software is their online
automated support, that tells me this specific error message is due to
the presence of another firewall or the interference of malware.
Which I know is untrue. The machine is clean. I've put days of work in
to getting it clean. NIS works on the Supervisor account.
And I don't have another firewall set up. And it seems grc.com agrees
with me on this because it reports that my machine is laid wide open to
the web. More over, if I change the user's account type that I've just
logged in as to a Supervisor account, restart the machine and log back
in, NIS starts up exactly as it should. If this user specifically was
somehow infected with malware or had an independent firewall running I
would get the same error. But I don't. NIS works, and the only thing
that has changed are the account privileges of the user account that has
logged in and needs the protection it is supposed to provide.
So it seems very apparent that some aspect of NIS is failing to load
because of the restricted privileges of a limited Windows account.
Whereas it is in fact the users using the limited accounts on my machine
that I'm principally concerned with!
So it seems very apparent that the Symantec automated support is wrong.
I can't find any reference to phone support that seems relevant to
setting up their software, only "virus incident support" that appears to
cost almost as much "per incident" as the software did in the first
place. I can't even find an email address for their support desk (do
they even have a support desk)?
Is it me, or have I been conned? Short of that, has anybody else got any
suggestions as to how I could get NIS working on the Limited user
accounts on my machine?
-Bill