A week or two ago I made a post explaining a problem I was occasionally (maybe once every 2 or 3 days) having with NIS 2009. Liveupdate would continue to work but in the norton window it would say the last definition update was well over an hour ago. Also, upon trying to restart the computer ccsvchst.exe would be found unresponsive and I would have to click end now to restart. Simply restarting still seems to temporarily correct this. The following is a link to the post I made about this problem 2-3 weeks ago. The last reply I made in that post helps detail the symptoms I experience when this happens.
This problem just happened for the first time in about a week. Liveupdate would still run but definition updates were "1 hour ago". For some time I thought this problem was tied to IE8 however I think I have found a more likely source, and I am positive this is not being caused by any kind of threat because I have double and triple checked this possibility many times.
I think this problem may be originating from the Microsoft .net framework. I have two computers at home. Both are essentially identical except I found one crucial difference recently. Both are fully updated so each has .net 3.0 which comes with windows cardspace. I never use this feature so I figured that I may as well see what it is. On one computer cardspace loaded just fine, while on the computer experiencing the norton problem it was not. When I would try and start cardspace from the control panel it would begin to load, freeze, close down, and then say that cardspace encountered an error and to view the event log for more info. The event log said it was event 257. My own research showed that there is no easy fix to event 257. For some people it was caused by an overfilled event log, which is not the case here, while another possibility was that .net framework was corrupt. I for one do not have any programs that require .net framework (to the best of my knowledge), and so I am not sure if the whole thing is corrupt, just one part of it is corrupt, or if corruption is not even the problem.
I have already tried uninstalling each of my .net framework components from the most to least recent as you are supposed to and then reinstalling each of them one by one. Each of the installs went smoothly but in the end cardspace was still showing this error. So far I have not been able to find a .net framework removal tool that can remove all traces of the programs so that any corrupt files could be wiped out, and I would rather just leave .net uninstalled altogether than resort to registry hacks.
Any ideas? Is there a part of NIS 2009 that is known to be affected by .net? Or am I on a wild goose chase?
-Pexley
XP SP3 IE8
.net framework 3.5 SP1
NIS 2009 16.5.0.135