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rancher
2-23-06, 11:10 PM
Trying to help a friend with a Dell XP - about a year old. She doesn't do anything much except e-mail, and her grandkids have loaded a couple games.

The machine came with a free Norton Anti-virus subscription for x number of months.
That was up a couple days ago and she tried to re-new on-line. She didn't follow through with all the download directions and kept getting screen pop-ups telling her to renew so she called me. When I try to download the new program from the e-mail she got after she paid Norton, it goes to their download manager, if I click start on the manager an error comes up saying "Error occurred communicating with server. Please ensure you have an active Internet connection and your proxy settings (if any) are correctly specified,"

In my quest I've: disabled XP firewall, disabled the current version of Norton, tried to run automated support and got a 404 error page. When I called Norton (and finally got a person who was in tech) they said to uninstalled the old version (04) that's still on the machine.

BUT, when I try to do that it says you must be signed in as the administrator for the computer to uninstall the program (using control Panel>add/remove)....well, she is and she's the ONLY one ever asigned to ANYTHING. I did a runas but that just took me to the logon for the admin which is no different that what we have to begin with. I'm stuck. I don't know much about this stuff and have tried to use all the available help files and googled information but I'm getting a headache. Anyone have an idea short of a bulldozer?

Thanks!
Rancher

IanS
2-24-06, 05:44 AM
Try logging in as Administrator with the password left blank.

rancher
2-24-06, 12:57 PM
Thanks, Ian, I'll give that a try.

Rancher

Jago
3-1-06, 11:57 PM
Greetings,

You can also try a program commonly used to remove spyware called, "Killbox".

You can visit the site by going to the link below. In my opinion, the program is free and it works great.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/files/killbox.php

rancher
3-2-06, 12:39 AM
Thanks - looks interesting Jago. I haven't been back to mess with her computer but will certainly give that a try.

Rancher

rancher
3-4-06, 03:20 AM
Update: Hate to admit too much stupidity...but I was looking at this all wrong. Seems it wasn't looking for the computer admin signin but rather Norton has a sign in....once I enabled Norton (the one I was trying to uninstall) and signed in as admin, it uninstalled just fine. Maybe this will help somebody else - guess I learned something today :confused:

Thanks for your help.

Rancher