Norton

[Galway]

Hello,
 I'm new to the site and I've having a problem with the mac. I noticed yesterday that all of my favorites and history had been deleted from internet explorer. Every time I would close down and reopen internet explorer, they'd be gone again. That and I noticed that the icon for the hard disk had somehow been renamed " . ".
Everything thing else on the mac seens to work fine.
I've been told that it may be spyware or virus so I ran Norton Anti-Virus 9.0. It would 'unexpectedly shutdown' after about a minute. This happened several times. When I notice that the hard drive icon on the desktop was named "." I renamed it 'hard disk' and reran Norton. It went for longer but still shut down.
That is all in OS 9.2. I went into OS 10 and the history and favorites seems ok. But Norton won't run from OS 10. Frustrating.

Any suggestions?

Steve

[SuperiorLightning]

basic summary - NORTON IS EVIL!!! lol, no, seriously, it is, its a crappy program that messes with your hard drive and takes up far too much system resources. i (unfortunatly) have windows computers, which have had norton goback on them, untill one day i installed a network card on one of them, and lovely norton decided to change the file structure of the entire disk!!!! my m8 and i looked into it, and we concluded that, because norton has such a presance on a HDD, that it would be unsafe to simply uninstall it, and that the safest option would be to format the entire disk.

ALTERNAT PROGRAMS

for spyware, use the best, webroot finds bloody everything (if you use bear share it will get rid of "save.exe" for you which is nice)

for viruses i use AVG free, but thers loads to choose from FOR FREE on www.download.com

basicaly, norton is like the McDonalds of software; pretends its brilliant, but its actualy full of Octopus brains

[hackologist+]

u want a better virus soft. go buy trend micro. its a hell of a lot better than norton

[RickW]

I wasn't aware that Internet Explorer was vulnerable to the same spyware that infects IE on Windows machine...

It sounds more like you have an issue with where ever IE is storing your config information.  The config might be corrupt, or the permissions might have been changed.

The other possiblity is that Norton is quarantining or corrupting your config information.  Maybe it found something a signature didn't agree with - who knows.

My suggestion?  Uninstall IE, and install the mac version of Firefox.  When my wife first got her mac-mini, I put IE on there and found it had problems displaying many web sites, and the interface was just plain ugly.  So I switched to firefox and have had no problems since.