Offmessage

So. You’ve decided to uninstall Norton Anti Virus. For whatever reason (and I can’t think of one much better than moving to something free, like AVG Free) you’ve decided it’s time and you click the magic ‘uninstall’ button. Everything appears to go OK, but then when you reboot your PC it can no longer connect to the network. This post will try and get you through it.

What’s happened is that Norton has made your DHCP client (the bit of software that actually gets an IP address for you) rely on a bit of it’s own software, but doesn’t remove that dependency when it uninstalls.

There are a couple of steps to identify this. Firstly you should open a Command Prompt (Start => Run… and then type in cmd) and type ipconfig /renew. If the results are An error occurred while renewing interface Local Area Connection: The RPC service is unavailable (2) (or something similar) this points to the problem. The next step is to open the Services list (Start => Control Panel then select Administrative Tools and then Services) and check to see if the DHCP Client is running. If you’re suffering from the Norton problem it won’t be. Try to start it (by selecting it in the list and then clicking the Start link on the left). You should get the message Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start. If you do you have suffered at the hands of Norton!

To fix it involves running regedit. This is a very powerful tool that deals with the guts of your computer, so only follow instructions unless you’re completely sure what you’re doing…

To run regedit click Start => Run and type regedit. Once regedit is running click Edit => Find… and in the text box type SYMTDI (this is the name of the service that Norton has removed, but your system still thinks it needs). Click the Find next button…

You are looking for a key (in the right hand pane) who’s name is DependOnService. Right click over the key name and select Modify. In the text box delete the whole line that has SYMTDI on it. Do not delete anything else! Click OK to save your changes and then hit F3 to search for the next value. You should find somewhere in the order of 3 to 6 instances of this key with SYMTDI in the value. Edit each one in the same way as just described. Once you are sure that you’ve removed all references to SYMTDI from keys named DependOnService close regedit and restart your computer.

You should now be able to connect to the network via DHCP! Now may be the moment to fire off a mail to Norton, complaining about the fact that a) their product won’t uninstall properly and b) it’s bundled with Windows XP - essentially tying all Windows users in unless they’re prepared to get into the depths of their machine.