Symantec Internet Security 2007 antispyware protection off….
and you can’t turn it on without an error… Oh boy… last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It certainly made it slightly less than tolerable to work on.) So, now, with new memory installed. Norton still shows problems, Antispyware is off, phishing protection is off and the catch is when trying to enable either there’s a cryptic error message….”internal program error” and a string of numbers which is nowhere to be found in symantecs online support. But the online support does say to try and use symantecs utility to “fix” the problem and if that fails or is unavailable uninstall using the Norton remover that they provide as a free download and reinstall…. thanks Symantec…. (You might find the antivirus removal tool list helpful.)
After the clean uninstall and reinstall, I still needed updates (dialup… ouch.) And initially things looked good, but the update aborted for some reason and I rebooted to clear the liveupdate process from memory and yet again…. antispyware protection is off, trying to switch it on causes the same error. So, I expanded my web searching and found (in google’s cache) a forum post from someone who spent 3 weeks (!) working through symantec support to get this fixed. Finally, they got to an executive support contact with a senior product specialist who essentially said, “it looks like you may have two copies of ccApp.exe running, try getting rid of one and see if that fixes it.” It turns out there WERE two entries for ccApp.exe, one in the registry’s run list and the other in the all users startup group menu. So, I removed the link in the startup menu and rebooted and voila – ALL components of Norton loaded happilly (except updates and full system scan which ran LONG after I left.)
I contacted back though for a followup to make sure all was well and after the liveupdate and scan finished Norton was good, they went through several reboots to make sure.
Now why couldn’t Symantec have that in the knowledge base for NIS 2007? (The day I searched it wasn’t there for the “internal program error” issue.)