I have found a very nasty problem when running Norton 360, and you take advantage of its Startup Manager. For different reasons -mostly caused by my installation of Norton Ghost- Norton technical support has told me two or three times so far that I need to run the Norton Removal Tool, which wipes out all traces of all Norton products in your computer .
It turns out that if you had used the 360 Startup Manager, for example to delay startup of some processes, the Norton Removal Tool doesn´t reset the Vista startup list to its original state. Therefore, after it wipes out all Norton product´s traces, it leaves out of the Vista startup list all processes that had been delayed via the 360 Stratup Manager, with no record of which ones those were. In my case I had probably a dozen, and there is no record of what was removed. The result is that I had to first try to guess what processes were missing, and reset the startup when possible via menus, or, in many cases, re-install full programs. After many weeks I am still not sure that I have completely recovered from this problem. In fact, I just found one more missing startup entry yesterday. I currently cannot use the Startup Manager at all anymore, in case I end up running into the same problem again.
In my opinion, this is a critical bug of the Norton Removal Tool that must be fixed.
I have found a very nasty problem when running Norton 360, and you take advantage of its Startup Manager. For different reasons -mostly caused by my installation of Norton Ghost- Norton technical support has told me two or three times so far that I need to run the Norton Removal Tool, which wipes out all traces of all Norton products in your computer .
It turns out that if you had used the 360 Startup Manager, for example to delay startup of some processes, the Norton Removal Tool doesn´t reset the Vista startup list to its original state. Therefore, after it wipes out all Norton product´s traces, it leaves out of the Vista startup list all processes that had been delayed via the 360 Stratup Manager, with no record of which ones those were. In my case I had probably a dozen, and there is no record of what was removed. The result is that I had to first try to guess what processes were missing, and reset the startup when possible via menus, or, in many cases, re-install full programs. After many weeks I am still not sure that I have completely recovered from this problem. In fact, I just found one more missing startup entry yesterday. I currently cannot use the Startup Manager at all anymore, in case I end up running into the same problem again.
In my opinion, this is a critical bug of the Norton Removal Tool that must be fixed.
It seems to me that the statup tool removes entries from the Vista startup list and places those entries elsewhere inside Norton folders. The only way to bring back to the Vista startup list those removed entries is via the 360 menus. If 360 is gone, along with all Norton files and folders -as the Norton removal tool does- the entries are lost forever.
The end result is that I am afraid to ever use the startup tool on 360 anymore.
And if 360 is uninstalled, I wonder if the uninstall routine is smart enough to bring back the Vista startup list to its original state, which would would be an even worse issue.
Vista startup list would be brought back to its original state upon uninstall of N360. All items Enabled/Delayed/Disabled through the Startup Manager of N360 would be brought back to the original state upon uninstall. We are looking at the behaviour with the Norton Removal Tool and would keep you posted.
