This is a real mess up like you’ve never seen. I will try to be simple:
First, I uninstalled norton because I was sick of norton 06 having too much ram grunt for my 12 year old pc, so I uninstalled norton 05 as well.
Now, when I turn on my Pc I still get messages from norton telling me to update stuff and then saying that i can’t and i should reinstall norton. Well, stuff them.
So I installed avast! home edition free and put in the key etc and it is working OK. Or so I thought. There is one BIG really really irritating problem: my microsoft word and excell files are stuffed. I can open up microsoft word and save a document. But if I try to open that saved doc I get “document not recognised”. If I open the doc with another program such as wordpad I get my stuff open but that’s no soln to say the least. Excel won’t open at all because it says “refuse to open because of virus problems”.
So, avaast appears to have quarantined [sort of] two of my most needed programs. How do i unquarantine them? When I did the scan just after installing avaast a viruus was found in a word section and i deleted that section. So, if the virus is gone I just want to open up my word programs again. Why won’t it let me???
I teach maths; i relaly relaly need these programs.
Did avast! give you any virus warning? (window titled “avast! Warning”, saying “A virus was found”, or something similar)?
If not, it’s hardly caused by avast! - it doesn’t “quarantine” things without asking you first…
I don’t trust Norton because it installs itself deep, a little too deep for my liking. And when you try to get it out, all sort of problems show up. >:(
Let’s try these things…
Open Control Panel → Add remove programs
Check if there are any remnants of Norton which might be interfereing with AVAST. If there is anything that shouldn’t be there, uninstall it.
You can also download the trial version of Registry Mechanic and remove all traces of Norton from windows registry.
NAV leaves numerous registry entries and these can and often do have hidden consequences so removing them is a first step.
Now, when I turn on my Pc I still get messages from norton telling me to update stuff and then saying that i can't and i should reinstall norton. Well, stuff them.
Norton/Symantec has a Live Update element outside of the NAV program and it may be this that is asking you to update. If you have no other Norton/Symantec products that use this Live Update tool you should be able to remove it with the windows add remove programs function. Strangely I have two entries For Symantec Live update (sorry one is Live Reg) and as far as I'm aware I only have Winfax Pro (now owned by Symantec).