I have a PC with Windows 7 PRO installed, and have backup hard drives I will "Image" my main system disk to, just in case I do something stupid and wipe out my disk. Which I occasionally do, from time to time.
In the past, I have been able to just "image" from my backup drive back to my main system, which is what I did this time as well. No problems, except my "backup" is about 6 months old. Everything runs just fine.......but..... Norton soon pops up and advises me that the software is out of date, and needs an update. I allow it, and the update APPEARS to go just fine. The last upgrade, however, it postpones, stating that it needs to run a "patch" whenever I will allow it. When I do this, Norton says it has to shut down all applications (the desktop goes BLACK for a few seconds), then the system repaints the desktop and everything looks OK, except Windows itself is now corrupted. Fatally.
I can select a folder on the desktop, and Windows will open it. But, if I try to select any subfolder, or run ANY executable program, Windows will pop up a dialog box stating that it doesn't have an action associated with that file type. The system is jammed, I can't run anything. Rebooting the system does not help. Windows is now fatally knotted up.
*************** The reason I'm mad is because I can still re-load my main disk from the backup drive.....which I have done three times now. Every time, as long as I refused to allow Norton to do the update, my system ran just fine. But, as soon as I ran the update, Windows got corrupted in exactly the same way. It APPEARS to be fine, but clicking on anything gets that error message that "windows does not have an action associated with that file type".......and the system is trashed once again. I've lost a couple of weeks of time fighting with this problem. This is just the end of YEARS of having Norton updates mess my systems up in one way or another.
I've had it with Norton. Over the years, I've lost far more files and time to Norton damaging things than any virus I ever got from the net. At this point, I'm looking for anything to replace Norton with something that WON'T damage my system itself. Any suggestions?