The system had been booted and up for about 10 minutes (yes, it would appear that some NIS 09 background process didn’t go well, since that is the default delay after boot) and before the system was used NIS produced a pop-up error with “your system is not secure” along with instructions of how to set the NIS service to automatic.
Before rebooting, I did a port probe from the Internet. It was clear that the PC was no longer protected by a firewall. (probes showed ports closed and not stealth) Also, the NIS History Log had entries about the firewall and various other things shutting down.
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The fact that NIS crashed doesn’t upset me too much (unless it happens frequently). What bothers me is that it left a PC naked on the Internet. Three weeks ago, I was using Zone Alarm Pro (since 2002). ZA would occassionaly crash. I am not sure how they did it, but when it crashed all network traffic would be halted. So, they had some form of deadman switch in their drivers that prevented a PC from being left naked on the Internet during a crash.
I must say that I am dissappointed. If ZA could lock down a PC when its core components crashed, I assume that Symantec could well implement something similar.