It has been an interesting two weeks or so. A couple of weeks ago I downloaded and installed Microsoft(R) Visual Studio(R) 2005 including Microsoft(R) Office(R) Visio(R) Enterprise Architect 2005 on my company laptop. My work machine is easily the most powerful machine in my organization. I have Dell(R) Inspiron(R) XPS(TM) with a True Pentium IV 3.4 GHz HyperThreaded CPU. 1GB of RAM on 2 DIMMs (for maximizing the HT technology) support this bad mamma with a 60GB, 7200 RPM hard drive. She touts a DVD +/- RW drive, 4 USB ports, firewire, a DVI port, and a sub-woofer in the battery (keeping in mind this is a laptop). Needless to say, I typically don't do a lot of waiting.
Last week I started noticing some SIGNIFICANT performance issues. They progressively worsened and seemed extra bad when in Word, Visio and Windows Media Player. I ran several complete anti-virus and anti-spyware/adware scans, all detecting nothing. Let me emphasize that they detected nothing. Not just innocuous items...NOTHING. So I ran cursory and extended Dell diagnostics. Again, the results were all successful. I worked with my network administrators to minimize on-demand scanning with our new anti-virus software to see if that's it. It has no impact. I spoke with a friend of mine who experienced similar issues (not with an XPS) and it was the motherboard in that case. Getting nervous and taking that person's advice, I decided to go ahead and give the good folks at Michael Dell's office a call.
I spoke to a support technician named Scott. He talked to me for a while and we ran through some cursory tests. He apologized that he had no concrete suggestions but gave me a list of ideas. I didn't actually expect him to have any concrete ideas as it literally could be anything. Anyway, one of his first ideas was to completely remove Norton Anti-Virus. We recently switched from Norton products to McAfee products and, as we all know, products like Norton do NOT uninstall completely. I located the complete uninstall instructions on Norton's Web site.
Amazing.
After running through an executable, a registry file, and a batch file, it seemed that Norton products were finally uninstalled. Oddly enough, as soon as I rebooted, some other strange things started happening. Wal-Mart Music Downloads Store reinstalled (could this explain the WMP problems?). That was unusual. I was still experiencing some slow downs and noticed that Microsoft(R) Office(R) Project(R) was displaying a bizarre message about Speech Recognition. Having tried to repair that explicity before (unsuccessfully) and knowing the Office products performance issues, I took a different tack. I started ALL Office products on my system.
As it turns out, Visio wasn't quite finished installing. Oh sure, I used it since installing with no issues. But once I ran the Norton clean-up, Visio had some more installing work to do. What is that about? Of course, once Visio finished installing, Project worked itself out just fine. I'm sitting here monitoring the CPU usage in task manager and everything is okee-day...so far. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for sure!
So it seems that Norton puts some stuff in place that doesn't easily come out. Is this to protect us? Is it simply poor software quality? Or is it, essentially, spyware? All-in-all, an educational and annoying experience. I'm glad I know, I wish I could have read someone else's blog on how to do it. If you are trying to remove Norton, here is a link to their 2004 products. “Removing Norton Products” Best of luck to you in your fights with all that is annoying and frustrating.!