Another customer calls, saying her internet mysteriously stopped working.

But only with broswing websites (page not found)… email and messenger still worked.

Its burdened with Vista and 512MB RAM… not a good start.

Soon, I see the PC is running both Norton internet security (with an expired license), and optus internet security suite 2008…

It gives a new meaning to the word “slow computer”

Since norton came with the new PC (A nasty trick, as far as I’m concerned), and once it expired, the customer installed optus ISS2008 (without removing norton first)

I spend most of the first hour trying to uninstall norton.

It got stuck right near the end, but eventually completed.

But browsing still wouldn’t work (pings work just fine)

At that point, I said: I need to work on this at the office, as there are too many possible causes, and I need to access a quick computer with internet access to fix this efficiently.

I disable the firewall, but still no browsing.

I get tired of waiting for vista, so I open up the PC, and install an extra 1GB RAM

I figure I might as well uninstall optus ISS2008, as it might somehow be blocking browsing… but I still can’t browse.

I take a look at device manager, and I see about 9 network adapters… I’m no longer sure which are real adapters, and which are used by vista as “virtual” adapters… but I see a few duplicate adapters… it looks strange, but not too concerning… after all, if they caused a problem, then they wouldn’t stop browsing only.

I do an ipconfig /all … and I’m given details on 60 network adapters :-O

Holy S… batman!

There are 43 X 6to4 adapters, and 11 X ISATAP adapters

A search on the net only shows things like “microsoft is aware of the error message… just ignore it, as it won’t affect anything”

Well I’m not buying it… it might have been caused by running 2 antivirus programs simultaneously, but I can’t leave all those adapters in place.

So I go through the registry, looking for isatap and 6to4, and find a few places where they show up. I’m careful when they show up in a group of 60 entries… So I delete almost all entries (except for the lowest number for isatap and the lowest number for 6to4.

I reboot (and cross fingers)… and vista starts without a single problem.

ipconfig looks normal, and a ping works… but still no browsing!

I install firefox and opera, but they cannot browse either.

Ordinarily, I’d say this is a firewall problem… but I’m really running out of options.

I reset the vista firewall back to default settings… still no browsing.

I remember that norton took a long time to uninstall… so I figure: maybe it didn’t fully uninstall.

So I get the latest norton removal tool, run it, and then restart the PC

Once Vista is running (more like crawling), I find I can finally browse 😀

But I’m also fuming at the piece of S… software from Symantec.

It’s now getting to the point where I sometimes have more problems with norton, as I have with infected systems… Grrr.