Norton 360 Premiere Edition Upgrade Kills Network

marccunn · January 10, 2014, 2:51am

Hello All:

Recently my subscriptions to Norton 360 expired, so I upgraded to Norton 360 Premiere Edition.

I have nine computers on my network.

V1 runs Windows 7 Ultimate. V9 has Windows 7 Home. V2 through V8 all have Windows XP Pro. All versions of Windows have all the updates and Service Packs installed.

When I was using Norton 360, all computers were visible in the viewing pane of Explorer, and I could move files and folders from any one to any of the others freely. I have all the drives on all the computers set to full sharing from all other computers on my network. Everything worked perfectly.

When I upgraded to Norton 360 Premiere Edition, the Norton download manager did not work properly on any of my computers.

The Norton download manager just re-activated my subscription on each computer, without installing anything new. I know this because after I tried the upgrade on each computer and then restarted, when I opened up Norton, the splash screen had the previous "Norton 360" title, rather than "Norton 360 Premiere Edition".

So I had to uninstall Norton 360. However, I used the uninstall option to save all my Norton 360 settings because I was going to immediately install Norton 360 Premiere Edition.

I then installed Norton 360 Premium on my computers. I know that because now the splash screen has "Norton 360 Premiere Edition".

However, when I restarted all the computers, only V1 (with Windows 7 Ultimate) shows all nine computers in the tree in the viewing pane.

V9 (with Windows 7 Home) only shows V1 and V9 in the viewing pane.

V2-V8 (with Windows XP Pro) do not show any of the other computers in the viewing pane. When I click on the "Workgroup" entry in the tree on any of those computers, I get a "Workgroup is not accessible...." error message.

However, when I open up my Network Map in Norton 360 Premiere Edition on each of the computers, all 9 computers are shown (I have set the network and each of the computers to "Full Trust") in each of the trees in the viewing panes of each tree.

It seems like Norton 360 Premiere Edition can see all the other computers on each of the computers, but somehow Norton 360 Premiere Edition changed some setting that I had in Norton 360 that allowed all the computers freely with each other.

This problem seems to effect the Windows XP Pro computers (V2-V8) severely (since none of them can communicate with any other computer), the Windows 7 Home computer (V9) partially (since it can communicate one-way only with V1), but the Windows 7 Ultimate is not affected at all (since it can communicate one-way with all the other computers)

Now, I can only use V1 to access files on any of the nine computers.

I can only use V9 to access files on V1.

V2-V8 cannot access any other computer on the network.

So what new settings in Norton 360 Premiere Edition have killed my network?

Any help you can render would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

marccunn

huwyngr · January 11, 2014, 4:00pm

marc,

I don't see how this could have resulted from the change from N360 Standard to Premier but in order to eliminate the possiblity of a concidental change elsewhere taking place for some unknown reason .....

Can you verify that the network name on the Windows 7 computers is not the default for Windows 7 onwards: HOMEGROUP since with this name they cannot interact with WORKGROUP computers which is the default for XP..

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/networking-home-computers-running-different-windows#networking-home-computers-running-different-windows=windows-7

As I said I don't see how installing the Premier edition could have changes this but since you think the download manager installation went wrong, anything is possible I guess.

See if you get any positive suggestions dealing specifically with what you have run into.

marccunn · January 17, 2014, 6:31pm

Hello All:

Thank you very much for your replies.

I did find the source of the problem.

For some reason, when I installed the 360 Premiere upgrade, somehow one particular setting was changed on my V1 computer (and on all the other computers in my network).

I cannot say for sure whether Norton 360 Premiere made this change, but....

I only know that when I was running Norton 360 the setting was working, and after I had installed the Norton 360 Premiere upgrade, the setting had changed.

The particular setting is (I have Windows 7 Ultimate on my V1 computer) Start > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy > Local Policies > Security Options > Accounts: Administrator account status (the first setting at the very top of the page).

This setting MUST be "Enabled" for ALL computers on the network, regardless of whether (like I do) you have some Windows 7 computers with "HOMEGROUP" and some with the XP Pro "WORKGROUP" on the same network.

When I was running Norton 360, I had the setting "Enabled".

After installing the Norton 360 Premiere upgrade on all the computers in my network (both for the W7 and the WXP Pro computers), the setting mysteriously changed to either "Disabled" or "Not defined" on all of them.

I had caught that on 8 of the 9 computers in my network, and had changed those 8 Administrator Account settings back to "Enabled" but I had failed to catch it on the V1 computer, which still had "Disabled".

Once I changed the VI Administrator Account setting back to "Enabled", suddenly all my computers could see eachother on the network, and I could transfer files between them without any problems, just like when I had Norton 360.

Thanks again for your responses

marccunn

DistEd2 · January 18, 2014, 12:35am

Interesting! Thanks for posting such a detailed description--you had a very complex installation, compared to most we see here, so this level of specificity may be of extreme use to anyone who might come here with a similar problem. I would encourage you to mark this thread Solved (giving your last response the credit as the Solution), so that others will be more likely to find it in their search...and that would include us, when researching a user's situation prior to our initial reply!

Thanks again, and glad you rooted it out!

V/R,

--DistEd2

marccunn · January 10, 2014, 2:51am