Hi all,
I'm sending this on behalf of an in-law, who's not tech-savvy. She has an older PC with Win XP on it, and uses Norton Anti-Virus 14.0. Her hard drive is maxed out, because of an issue with the older anti-virus definitions not being removed when new ones are installed. As a result the VirusDefs directory is now 8.4G, with 5,700 files is 513 folders. Most of these are tmpxxxx.tmp format, but some are also 20090727.001 and similar format.
From searching it appears that this is a somewhat known problem (disappointing, given Symantec/Norton's reputation), however none of the workarounds I see are sufficient for me.
I tried deleting the cached files from LiveUpdate, but this only deleted a small amount - 98 files. The cache size is currently only set to 483 MB.
I tried just deleting the older files, but they're read-only and thus I can't. I cannot uncheck the read-only attribute as I do not have permissions, even though this computer only has one account (as Administrator).
I see one mention of booting to safe mode to delete the files. I'd rather not do this, as it seems extreme; also I'm accessing this computer via remote desktop, and thus can't do it remotely myself, and this person isn't someone I could really walk through it easily.
I've thought about uninstalling and reinstalling the software - but from what I've read that actually may not help; and also that seems like a very last resort.
Can anyone help me out with this?
Thanks.