Internet access blocked for some apps run on non-administrator login

Norton Security | Norton Internet Security
1

Environment:

Windows XP SP 3

Norton 360 4.0

 

I'm a software development professional and as such am quite concerned about security.  My XP system has two logins, one called Boss with administrative privileges, and one called Worker without them.  To thwart malware infections I spend 99% of my time on Worker, using Boss only to do administrative tasks such as installing new apps.

 

Prior to installing Norton 360 there were no problems using apps when logged in as Worker.  After installation though, apps continue to function properly on Boss, but Worker experiences the following problems:

 

Google Earth - fails on startup with dialog box saying "We are unable to connect to the Google Earth servers to validate your account

Internet Explorer - browsing gives an error screen reporting that "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"

Yahoo! Messenger - fails to sign me in

 

Other Internet apps like Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, and World of Warcraft aren't affected.

 

I was an operating system developer for years and had my share of experience in networking.  This one has me scratching my head.  Please help!

 

Thanks

 

Rick

 

2

Do you still have v4.0 or v4.1 (updated)? 

 

Please check your IE Options > Advanced > Security to see if the "Check for server certificate revocation" is enabled or not.  Disable it if it is and retry the web sites, please.

3

I would be more inclined to suspect that the Norton 360 PC Cleanup function is overzealously removing necessary cookies for these sites, rather than a firewall issue.

 

Thanks for your reply, but it doesn't compute.  I hope a professional from Norton or a competent forum assistant can advise me how I can remedy this problem.

4

 

rickace wrote:

Thanks for your reply, but it doesn't compute.  I hope a professional from Norton or a competent forum assistant can advise me how I can remedy this problem.

You are also having problems with sites that do not require authentication?

 

5

I would like to suggest that both of these gurus are extremely competent, and quite likely to be of assistance if you were perhaps a trifle more receptive. :smileywink:

6

Environment:

Windows XP SP 3

Norton 360 4.0

 

I'm a software development professional and as such am quite concerned about security.  My XP system has two logins, one called Boss with administrative privileges, and one called Worker without them.  To thwart malware infections I spend 99% of my time on Worker, using Boss only to do administrative tasks such as installing new apps.

 

Prior to installing Norton 360 there were no problems using apps when logged in as Worker.  After installation though, apps continue to function properly on Boss, but Worker experiences the following problems:

 

Google Earth - fails on startup with dialog box saying "We are unable to connect to the Google Earth servers to validate your account

Internet Explorer - browsing gives an error screen reporting that "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"

Yahoo! Messenger - fails to sign me in

 

Other Internet apps like Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, and World of Warcraft aren't affected.

 

I was an operating system developer for years and had my share of experience in networking.  This one has me scratching my head.  Please help!

 

Thanks

 

Rick

 

7

Google Earth - fails on startup with dialog box saying "We are unable to connect to the Google Earth servers to validate your account

Internet Explorer - browsing gives an error screen reporting that "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"

Yahoo! Messenger - fails to sign me in

 

Like previously with posters having problems with Skpe and MSN messenger etc. after installing Norton,  

 

http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Internet-Security-Norton/Firefox-and-Netscape-browsers-work-but-not-IE-Safari-or-Chrome/m-p/187389#M93677

 

Quads

8

SendOfJive

 

My apologies if my remark offended you.  I do sincerely appreciate your help because this problem has been a real thorn in my side.  It's great to have experienced people staffing the forums because even as a seasoned professional there's just way too much stuff about Windows that I'm unfamiliar with.  Thank you again for answering.

9

Quads

 

I clicked your link and followed the directions for adjusting the settings on the Connections tab of the Internet Options window.  Apparently the Boss and Worker logins have separate LAN settings.  Worker had Use Proxy Server selected so I clicked it off and hit the OK button which caused IE to hang for several minutes.  I killed it with Task Manager and restarted.  Fortunately the new settings had been registered.  After that IE, Messenger, and Google Earth all came back to life!  Never would I have suspected that changing a setting in IE would affect other apps as well.  How did you even learn something like that??

 

BTW I'd been using this computer for two years and never had a problem until recently.  Even on Worker somehow a piece of malware found its way in and was popping up weird windows.  I had McAfee on another computer years ago, but wasn't pleased with it. It was hard as heck to uninstall as well.  I ended up on their forums and found a laborious set of instructions that involved among other things deleting stuff from the Registry.  Never again.  During the initial scan after installation Norton 360 quickly found the malicious program and wiped it out.   Good stuff and good tech support.

 

Thank you and all who replied for your help.  I'm a satisfied customer and would gladly recommend Norton products to other users.

 

Rick

 

10

Hello rickace

 

If at some time in the future, you might have need to remove your Norton product thoroughly, I just wanted to inform you that there is a Norton Removal Tool that will remove all Norton products so that you wouldn't have to go digging thru the registry to remove Norton. Just some information for the future;

11

Hi rickase, I took your remark to be an offhand comment made in the course of computer troubleshooting, so think nothing of it. I do appreciate your offer of apology however and can only hope that others who frequent the forum will also be equally impressed by your gesture. Such displays of character are far too rare these days and I genuinely thank you for the kind reply. Also, I’m glad to see that a solution was found for you. I hope all is well. SendOfJive

12

floplot

 

Thanks for the heads-up.  I don't expect to have to remove Norton 360 as it seems to be doing just fine at what it's meant to do and not causing any problems since I changes the settings in IE. But it sure is nice to know if I had to do so it wouldn't be like going through the process of mucking around in the registry, deleting files, and whatever else it entailed.  Fortunately as a software guy I had no difficulty understanding what had to be done, but for a non-techie it could have been a nightmare.

 

I do find it odd that we users need to purchase additional products to secure our computers.  Why can't Microsoft provide that service to its customers?

 

In any event, I'm glad that Norton/Symantec has developed solid software to keep our systems free of malware.  I could have opted for a less expensive Norton product, but a few extra bucks spent on extra protection is IMO a sound investment.

 

Rick

 

13

SendOfJive

 

Thank you for your kind words.   And yup all's well now.  What perplexed me the most was that the behavior differed between the two logins.  At first I thought it had something to do with the lack of administrator privileges on Worker.  I've installed a few apps that will only run on Boss, perhaps because their developers never tested them on a non-privileged login.  But it turned out that the settings for IE weren't right on Worker.  I never would have figured this out on my own because three apps weren't making their connections to hosts on the Internet and IE was but one of them.  Who'da thunk that two were taking their cues from IE of all places?

 

As a guy who's been in the business since 1975 and cut his teeth developing operating systems for mainframes in assembly language, I'm glad to make the acquaintance of the support team here.

 

BTW my first job out of school was in the System Support Group at Dun & Bradstreet.  Talk about a database, this one was HUGE for its time.  We had reports for around three million companies on file and my crew developed a custom OS because the ones offered by the hardware vendor (Xerox Data Systems) wouldn't cut the mustard.  We had one mainframe running CP-V, the Xerox timesharing system that beat anything IBM had to offer at the time, and that's where we typed in our code, compiled it, and debugged it the best we could on hardcopy ASCII terminals. All the other mainframes ran DBOS, our homebrew OS.  There were two other teams of programmers who built their apps on DBOS coding in FORTRAN.

 

We had two heavy-duty "file processor" machines, two "application processor" machines, and two other less powerful ones that downloaded data from minicomputers in the field offices every night and spun it onto 9-track magtape for input to the other machines.  Networking gear had yet to become availablet; circa 1979 Digital Equipment Corporation (my second employer), Intel, and Xerox jointly invented Ethernet and unshered in the age of networking.

 

Anyway, back to the database.  One of my cronies also named Rick took a photo of our disk room and decades later put it up on this page on his website.  Rick called it a laundromat and he and I would dream up uses for old disk drives sent to pasture.  Cotton candy spinners, pottery wheels, ...  It took an army of operators to tend them and a staff of top-notch Xerox techies to keep them running.]

 

A blast from the past.

 

Rick

 

14

Hi rickase,

 

All of that room and equipment to store 10 GB!  Sometimes I'll be sitting at my humble little desktop machine playing with Google Earth and I'll be struck with the notion of how much computing power we can now summon up without even thinking about it.  Amazing.

15

 

 

 But it turned out that the settings for IE weren't right on Worker

 

 

 

IE uses the settings that are in the Control Panel and that is why other programs can have the same problem,  Other programs are created to use the settings for Internet Connections in the Control Panel also.

 

Each account can have different Internet settings and restrictions, depending on who it is for (kids, Parents, Guest)

 

Quads

16

SendOfJive

 

Hehe and if ya think D&B was primitive, during my senior year in high school there was exactly one computer in the entire building.  Our IBM 1620 was a shade larger than a large rolltop desk with a front panel decked out in matrices of small incandescent lamps (cheap LEDs weren't available then).  Check that Wiki page and see why some peeps called it the CADET.  Now for the good stuff:

 

No hard drive.  When you turned it off it forgot everything.  After turning it on in the morning it took maybe 15 minutes to warm up.  That time could be shortened if you know a neat little trick.  Open the panel on the right side of the machine to expose a large circuit board with relays protected by a plexiglass panel.  Push the panel down over a certain relay to close its contacts, and voila!  Time to compute.

 

But how?

Input devices:  card reader, typewriter keyboard, four toggle switches that the software could interrogate

Hardcopy output device:  card punch, typewriter.

Video device: continuous-form paper printed upon by the typewriter.

RAM: 20K 1/2-bytes (10K bytes) of magnetic core memory.  Yes, K as in 1,000.

No mouse.  No sound.  No networking.  Fat power cable to drive relays, discrete transistors, etc.

 

A math teacher who'd learned FORTRAN and taught my class.

 

LOL.  All you could do was run FORTRAN programs (no debugger), assembly programs, and machine-language programs, period.  Punch up a deck of 80-column cards with your FORTRAN program on a Model 29 keypunch.  Be careful though because if you make a mistake you can't "un-punch" it so you have to toss the card and try again.  Don't drop the deck, either because it's a pain re-ordering it. Reset the machine and load the compiler - a deck of cards about three inches thick. Plop the FORTRAN deck in the card reader and pray the compiler likes it.  If not, fix the bad card(s) and retry.  Then your program runs.  If there's a run-time error the compiler will gladly tell you by printing the word ERROR followed by a number on the console.  Then you had to look it up in a book to see what it meant.  ERROR 63 meant float-point overflow; 10^46 was about as high the compiler would accommodate.  Normally the compiler would accept multiple programs, but sometimes it got confused and had to be reloaded from scratch.

 

I took to this baby like a fish takes to water and was ultimately writing programs in machine language.  Each instruction was 12 digits long:  2 digits for the opcode, 5 for the first operand and another 5 for the second.  Kind of a pain because if you wanted to insert an instruction you had to go back and fix every other instruction that branched beyond the new one.

 

The amount of computing power IBM developers squeezed out of that machine was simply amazing.  But at the time IBM was rolling cash and could afford to hire the very best talent.

 

After high school I studied for 4 years to earn a B.S.  Our school had a Xerox mainframe and that's where I learned how to program its operating system, which made me a shoo-in at D&B.  Very few code in assembly language anymore.  Good C compilers showed up during the 1980s making it feasible to develop an OS in a sorta hi-level language.  C++ was a pig in a tutu; I never learned it and went straight from C to Java when it came out.

 

One can only wonder how programmers got anything out of ENIAC.  No transistors, just a boatload of vacuum tubes, a mammoth power sink, a ventilation problem, and a repairman's nightmare!

 

17

Quads

 

Ahh so.  I think I get it now.  Control Panel is program-neutral; it sets parameters for other apps to interrogate.  Microsoft developers equipped IE with a window to offer another way to change the settings.  Therefore I could have also remedied my problems via Control Panel as well.

 

Good stuff to know.  BTW what's the word on Windows 7?  Vista seemed like such a loser I've remained with XP instead of upgrading.

18

Hi rickace:

 

I found it difficult to find my way around to settings, and places in Win 7 at first because I have been years on XP.  It does have some nice features, and it boots up much faster.  I ran a dual boot for a while until I got used to it.  I still haven't seen any real program conflicts with Win 7, which is nice and some of my favourite programs are older ones.

 

All in all, I am very pleased with it.  If you decide to give it a try, check your machine with the compatibility tool on the Microsoft website.  My machine has an Intel Management Engine Interface incompatibility that won't let me run Aero without causing video card problems.  It helps to know about those kinds of issues ahead of time.

19
rickace wrote:

 

Good stuff to know.  BTW what's the word on Windows 7?  Vista seemed like such a loser I've remained with XP instead of upgrading.

HI  rickace

 

Unlike Vista, Windows 7 is well worth putting on your PC provided it is a reasonable spec.

 

Here is a link to the upgrade advisor that Delphinium is referring to.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15&displaylang=en

 

Delphinium's overall comments reflect the positive experience of a lot of users that I know.

20

delphinium and mdturner

 

Thanks mucho for both of your replies.  I'm so far out of the loop these days it would have taken me quite some time to learn what you both summarized.

 

I'm an old-school developer who cut his teeth on mainframes long before the Internet and the Web brought viruses, trojans, rootkits, and who knows what else to our cozy little homes.  My first PC ran Windows 98 which was more of a DLL than an operating system, as a buggy program could write all over the data of the vulnerable OS and screw things up in countless ways that always required a reboot.  At the office we ran NT which was actual a real operating system with each process having its own virtual address space and no access to kernel data.  Yay!  XP as I understand grew out of NT and at last Microsoft had marketed a viable product to home consumers.  Imagine my delight when the BSOD no longer interrupted an online gaming session (EQ or WoW).

 

I'm also of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" persuasion.  XP does everything I need and it does it well.  There were some bad rumblings about Vista so I kept clear.  I plan to continue with XP until the need to upgrade comes along.  It's comforting to know that upgrading to Windows 7 will cause little more inconvenience than learning a new way of managing my comp.  With a solid OS and Norton keeping the bad guys out, I'm good to go.  I'll run that MS app that scans the hardware for compatibility issues with W7.  This box is only two years old so it should do rather well.

 

My Norton 360 has already sniffed out and stomped on a few buggies.  Again you've made me glad I chose to invest in a Norton product.  This is tech support at its finest.  A salute from an old pro, and keep up the good work.

 

Rick