XP hangs on start screen after Norton update

Recently my brand new home build XP machine suddenly refused to get past the 'black flag' start-up screen. Well, as I hadn't got too far with the instals and cut a long story short, I reformatted the disk and started again, without looking to deep into possible causes.

All was well until this morning when a little pop-up message on the task bar asked me if I wanted to update Norton Inernet Security 2005. I had updated recently but clicked OK anyway. The updater went online and did its thing but another window came up and said to run Live Update again as two further files were required. This went and an 'Update Completed' message appeared with a 'Do you want to restart now' request. Yes I said.

Now it won't get passed the start screen again! Leave it long enough and it switches to the Safe Mode selection screen. Tried restoring to earlier version - no good. Tried uninstalling Norton - can't do it from within Safe Mode. Tried running Norton - comes up with error message and offers to send fault log to Microsoft.

Help me!!!!!

System:
Asus AV8 MoBo
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU
1GB Corsair ValueSelect RAM
Seagate Barracuda 80GB S-ATA system drive
Seagate Barracuda 160GB S-ATA media (100GB partition) & Back-up (50GB) drive
XP sp2

 

Hello bobzie,

You're going to have to get NIS off, and the only clean way to do that is to start again.

FWIW, read thru this thread and look at Johanna's take on NIS2005.

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=43226

Or go to the Symantec site and look for tool(s) for NIS removal.

Regards - Charles

 

SORTED! It WAS Norton. I couldn't uninstal it using windows tools from inside Safe Mode but I found a utility on Symantec's support site called 'SymNRT' which did the job and asked fror a reboot. Eyes closed, fingers crossed, clicked OK and ...... it was okay. Now protected by ZoneAlarm.

 

Hi bobzie, glad you solved it.

Another satisfied Symantec customer

Regards - Charles