Please help, 3 weeks and counting now, averaging 4 hours sleep a night trying to get this sorted.
Ok, from the top, my wife's laptop, a HP Pavillion dv6760ea, came pre installed with Vista Home Premium 32 bit, NIS 2008, and a bunch of the usual HP bloatware. It was working fine for about 11 months. About 3 weeks ago, the laptop began to freeze randomly after each bootup, it never took more than a few minutes, and didn't coincide with any regular activity I was doing, only way to restart it was by the power button. This may have coincided with an update of some sort (could have been to NIS, Vista, or the usual apps that update themselves, Adobe, Apple software etc, but unfortunately my wife does not recall).
With some diagnostics, it appears that Norton was the catalyst, once I disabled the Norton service with a selective startup, no more problems, as the NIS 2008 subscription was about 25 days from expiry, I removed it (from control panel, uninstall) and attempted to install NIS 2009.
I downloaded the latest NIS09EN install file from the Norton web site, it began to install then froze the PC at the initialising screen.
Right, to cut a very very very long story short, as I have trawled this forum, many other forums, the whole internet and tried just about everything suggested, so I am going to summarise in bullet points below what I have done so far.
- Applied all updates to Vista.
- Upgraded Vista to SP2.
- Upgraded the BIOS to the latest version.
- Upgraded ALL drivers on the PC to the latest version (using HP software, driverscanner etc).
- Disabled windows indexing (search service)
- Disabled UAC
- Removed almost all bloatware
- Started machine with the most basic number of services that allow an installation
- Scanned with the Norton boot CD, VundoFix, Malwarebytes, Hijack This, nothing found.
- NO other security software besides Norton is running or has ever been installed
- Windows Defender, Firewall off
- Removed secdrv.sys and checked for uacd.sys in hidden devices
- Ran the Norton removal tool MULTIPLE times in a row
- Manually cleaned the disk and registry of every removable Norton / Symantec entry
- Deleted the Efadata folder under system volume information.
- Reset the registry permissions using the microsoft utility
- Enabled the hidden administrator account, tried everything with "Run As Administrator"
- Used CC Cleaner about 100 times
Many many combinations and permutations of the above have been tried (following the sequences described in these forums by the Norton guys too), and probably more things that I can no longer recall. I have had to do system repairs and restores, registry restores. The nearest I got ONCE was the installation looked like it was complete and was "starting services", but then the pc froze again, it would not restart, I had to remove NIS in safe mode and go back to the drawing board, am just about ready to give up on NIS 2009, at the end of my tether, please help! Have I missed anything? Thanks, in advance.
Harry - severly sleep deprived, depressed, onto a 3 pill headache