I just ran the NIS 2011 uninstall program followed by the Norton Removal tool, however this apparenbtly did not remove all of Norton from my computer. If I now access the Windows Security Center by clicking on the red shield icon in the system tray, the display claims that I am being protected both by NIS firewall and by NIS anti-virus, but this cannot possibly be true since there are no Norton EXE or DLL files on my computer any more, and there are no Norton services in the list of active services, and there are no longer any Norton directories in my Program Files directory, etc. Why does my computer continue to send Windows false information claiming that Norton is active and protecting my computer, when there are no Norton processes in the Task Manager process list, and no Norton services running in the Services area? RichD
Norton Removal Tool doesn't remove Norton. It leaves 5-7 hidden drivers behind in the DeviceManager.
Start menu -> Control panel -> System -> Advanced system settings -> Environment varibles.
In the bottom window, click New and enter devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices for Variable name and 1 for Variable number.
Your devicemanager will now show hidden drivers.
Go to Devicemanager, and in the View menu, select Show hidden devices.
An entry named Non-Plug and Play Drives will appear. Even after running the normal Norton uninstaller and the Norton Removal Tool, there will be a number of Symantec entries left in here, with the corresponding registry items in the registry. Right-clicking on these entries and uninstalling them that way gets rid of them, and the corresponding registry keys.
Thanks for giving the information on accessing the hidden drivers in Windows. I followed the instructions and found 21 entries for Symantec drivers on my system (this was after I had executed the Norton Removal Tool !)
Sixteen of the entries were grayed-out and no longer fully installed, but 5 of the entries were fully functional and still running on my system (see bold items below).
Since my objective was to completely clean my system of Norton remnants, I then right-clicked on each one of the items to uninstall or delete all 21 of them. Hopefully this will help clean up my system and allow me to do a normal re-installation of NIS 2011.
EraserUtilDrv10822.sys
EraserUtilDrv11010.sys
EraserUtilDrv11110.sys
EraserUtilDrvI9.sys
EraserUtilRebootDrv.sys
NAVENG.SYS
NAVEX15.SYS
SYMDS.SYS - Symantec Data Store
SYMEFA.SYS - Symantec Extended File Attributes
Symantec Hash Provider
Symantec Heuristic Driver
Iron856.sys - Symantec Iron Driver
SYMDNS.SYS - Driver used by the Symantec Firewall product to validate DNS responses before allowing them through the firewall.
