Firewall disabled when rebooting computer

I'm running Win XP Pro on an IBM T43 laptop. Recently, whenever I restart the computer following installation of various upgrades, the Norton 2006 Personal Firewall is disabled, and I have to manually reenable it. (The XP SP2 firewall is disabled.) This no doubt is related to the fact that many of the upgrades do not install successfully, despite multiple attempts and claims by the machine that the installations were successful. So, two questions, really, as described above: why does the firewall get disabled, and why don't the various upgrades install? I have run several virus searches, including the deep search from Symantec, with no evidence of problems. Ditto for Spybot and Ad-Aware. I hope forum readers will have suggestions, before I attempt to deal with IBM/Lenovo support. Any ideas will be much appreciated. Thank you.

 

The MS updater does the disabling as part of the process it needs to access your files directly. It re-enables when finished but if it doesn't finish properly I can envision that you may be left with a disabled firewall.

Try changing your method of updating. Either manually download them from the Catalog site or else select the option in Windows Updater to have it download the updates and notify you without installing them. Then boot to safe mode and see if they can be installed without problems. It's possible you have some conflicting condition that can be avoided in safe Mode. It may only apply to one certain update so you could later return to your normal method.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Browse.aspx?displaylang=en&categoryid=7


HTH