I was in the process of cleaning a PC from multiple nasty Malware infections, when I needed to start XP normally, in order to install and update Windows Defender, Avira Antivir, MalwareBytes, and SuperAntiSpyware.

The strange thing was that Malwarebytes could get internet updates, but SAS, defender and antivir could not.

Internet Explorer seemed to be working normally.

Defender would give a 0x80072EFD error

SAS would say something like: Make sure your firewall is not blocking superantispyware.exe

Nothing on the internet helped.

But then I started to look at the services carefully, and I noticed that some Norton / Symantec services were disabled.

I eventually found out what happened:

someone had tried to uninstall Norton Personal Firewall (NPF), but it didn’t complete (I’m not surprised), or it was removed incorrectly.

In the und, I found that the norton/Symantec services had all been disabled, and the c:program filesnorton personal firewall folder had been removed.

But had been overlooked was: c:program filescommon filessymantec shared

Once that folder had been deleted, internet access returned to normal, and I could finally use SAS to remove any remaining infections that Malwarebytes had missed.