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When the PC honeymoon ends

posted on Wednesday December 21, 2005 6:42 PM

I bought a new PC a couple of months ago, a Dell Dimension 9100. This was my first upgrade in a really long time and I looked forward to an exciting new world of fast and efficient computing. Of course after the initial honeymoon reality sets in, or rather, microsoft products begin to freak out.

It all started when I installed SpyBot Search & Destroy. Oh wait, scratch that. It actually started when I couldn't get whatever cd-burner Dell installed to work so I tried using something else I had on disk. Ok so some of this is my fault for trusting windows software install wizards. Anyway, somehow I ended up with something called Veritas Storage Guard installed - which turned out to be an annoying resource hog that was really difficult to disable or unistall once I realized it was unnecesary and tried to get rid of it. (This isn't the only sign that the honeymoon was ending - overall my PC performance was/is way less that stellar. It takes forever to shut down, for example, and certain things freeze up for no reason).

I've used Spybot S&D in the past not only to scan for syware but also to manage what applications run when I boot up the PC. If I can't remove storage guard, I figured, at least I can stop the process from running automatically. Well the Spybot install gave me no end of trouble. I'd get through the install wizard and then it would prompt me to get updates, which would freeze my PC everytime. Finally I got the updates manually from Spybot first, then did the install. That time I could go ahead and run the spyware scan.

So everything seemed to be good then. I unchecked the storage guard executable (sgtray.exe) from start up items and rebooted. Here's where it gets fuzzy. The next day (I think) I tried to get my yahoo email (web interface) and the link wouldn't resolve. I have a merged yahoo/SBC email account so the interface is a little non-typical. I tried another non merged yahoo address and that was fine. I tried every browser I have installed and none of them could pull up my sbc merged yahoo email inbox.

Have you ever done tech support via chat? I gave it a try with SBC. I started the chat with something like "I can no longer get to my yahoo web-based email. I think it has to do with Spybot Search & Destroy (?)". Well, after 15 canned questions and after 15 of my dutifull 'yes' and 'no' answers the guy finally asked "Have you installed any spyware software on your computer?". Hey why don't you read my first message? Despite his promising question it turned out he didn't have any specific info but he did suggest removing Spybot all together. Which I did. And the email started working again. Sometimes it's the simplest things.

After all this I thought I was in the clear. I can use something else besides Spybot for spyware detection, right? In fact my Norton installation has an anti-spyware component. I decided to give that a try. (This is how one short very specific task invariably turns into hours and hours of futzing). I tried running a Norton spyware scan but when I clicked 'scan' nothing happened. No error message but no dialog indicating anything was happening. I checked the Norton 'activity log' and not only saw that no spyware scan was done but also that my last antivirus scan was a while ago. Isn't NAV set to run once a week? So then I tried to run a manual anti-virus scan and the same thing happened, or didn't happen. No response and no error. Well so now I've been wrestling with that for the better part of today uninstalling and reinstally Norton. Uninstalling the 'Norton Internet Security 2005' that came with the PC and installing 'Norton SystemWorks' from cd instead *appears* to have done the trick. I feel like I've finally accomplished something! But I gotta wonder, is this how I want to spend my vacation?

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