Norton 360 (2)

So I followed up the attempt to get Norton 360 fixed with a visit to the on-line support, via chat.

Take 1 of this was just a first line guy, who wanted me to change the clock on my machine - which I wasn't really happy to do, but Norton recovered, I don't think he had done anything.

On Take 2, the call was escalated to a second level guy who took over my machine and played with the permissions in the registry for the user the doesn't work properly. After much messing around, and still being unable to get this to work he decided that it was time to re-install IE. He downloaded IE7, and ran the installer. All apparently OK. Now NONE of my limited accounts can initialize IE. Is this because of the install? Is this something Norton is doing? I cannot tell. IE is not very important to me - except to Microsoft Update, which has to be run from an Admin anyway. My system is very important, I use it a lot, so this is as far as I go - for now.

Now when he found that IE didn't work, he decided to do a system restore. The restore he chose did not work. In all my years in IT I've only known it work ONCE. What it did do was remove all the information from the system about how to connect back into the level2 organisation at Symantec. By then I'd given up anyway. He was clearly prepared to risk things on my system that I would think twice before trying.

So 2 protection products that do harm:
Bullguard, that I replaced because the system kept running out of memory when I copied lots of files form other machines
Norton 360, for the reasons above.