GTD Wannabe

Norton Crap Can Affect the Strangest Things

July 30th, 2007 | by GTD Wannabe |

This is one of those bizarre stories where one problem with your computer leads you down a rabbit hole. When you eventually come out the other side, you discover that the culprit was something completely asinine, like say, some piece of software that you uninstalled weeks ago!

Context: Backing Up

I noticed over at GearFire that you can get Free Acronis TrueImage if you have a Seagate Hardrive. Since I’ve just purchased a new external SeaGate hard drive for backing up purposes (and hated the software that came with it), I thought, great! Let’s get this new stuff and make an image of our working computer.

Now, the external hard drive is actually attached to my desktop. But I want to access it from my laptop. Should be easy enough; just share the drive, and I can see it from my laptop, just like I do with every other drive on my desktop. I’ve done it before; it’s an easy setting to change. I’ve even figured out how to get my new McAfee anti-virus/firewall software to all the talking back and forth.

Not So Easy

So, even though I’ve shared drives before without much problem, this one stumped me. I did the share, went back to my laptop and tried to open the drive. No go. Even went through the Network Places, navigated carefully to the new drive, which I could see, but still no go. I wasn’t allowed to open it.

The error, which I had never seen before, was “Not enough server storage is available”. What?

Since Google is my friend, I checked it out. Several sites point back to a registry edit that might be required on the server (i.e., the computer that holds the drive I’m trying to get to, not the computer doing the calling). They all point back to this Microsoft knowledge base article that gives you very clear instructions on the registry edit. I followed said clear instructions. To the letter.

No go.

Norton Crap

If you read the Microsoft article, you’ll note that the ultimate cause of the problem is that when you install Norton AnitVirus, you can receive the aforementioned error message. Hmmmmmm.

It turns out that I’ve been using Norton antivirus products for years now. It’s available for free by my university. At one point, all of my machines had it. And it worked fine.

But then the romance cooled. First, the last time I reformatted my laptop (every 12-18 months or so), I couldn’t get Norton to reinstall. Even though I had completely reformatted my C drive, and installed fresh WinXp from scratch, Norton kept giving me grief about not being an administrator. Me not an administrator? I am the administrator. Nobody else touches my machine. I don’t even have a general or power-user account on this thing. It’s all me all the time. Yeeesh. But Norton didn’t listen to reason. I tried many times over the past year to get it to work. No go there.

So for a while I was using a freeware antivirus program. It was okay, but not quite satisfying. But I really didn’t feel like ponying up money for software that I should have had working for free, courtesy of my university.

Anyway, I got really bitter when the antivirus on my desktop started going hinky. Norton was still running, seemingly fine. It updated itself every week, and performed the weekly scan, right on schedule. Except, the weekly scan started taking 3 minutes. Now, consider the fact that I’ve got three internal hard drives in that machine, the smallest of which is 120 GB. 3 minutes? To scan everything? I don’t think so. Obviously, there was something wrong. I uninstalled/reinstalled a few times, but couldn’t get it to work.

McAfee to the Rescue

All this to say, I was finally so disenchanted with Norton that I broke down and bought McAfee. It was a reasonable price to protect both machines. Like a good girl, I went to uninstall Norton before installing the new antivirus program. It wouldn’t let me uninstall!!! I finally had to basically rip it out of my hard drive by manually deleting directories and registry edits. Don’t do this at home – it’s not the recommended procedure! By this time, I was cheerfully cursing Norton.

Fast Forward

I did this weeks ago, but it seems that Norton crap was still infecting my machine. Just yesterday, I had the most bizarre thing happen. Every time I right-clicked on something, Norton would pop up and tell me that it was in the middle of doing an installation, and could I please put in the installation CD. I would have to cancel it in order to get to the right-click menu that I was originally aiming for.

When I looked in my Add/Remove programs list – Norton was sitting there, grinning at me. I clicked to uninstall it, and it went away, quite cheerfully. The right-click problem stopped. I thought to myself, “Phew, it’s finally gone!”

But Norton is a sneaky troll…

Back to the Point

The point of this whole exercise was to be able to do some backing up to my new external hard drive. Even after the registry edit above, and uninstalling Norton yesterday, again, I still couldn’t see the drive.

More searching online brought me to the Norton Removal Tool, designed “to remove a failed installation or a damaged Norton product.” I downloaded it and ran it. Rebooted my machine (the desktop, that is). It seems that Norton still had something, who knows what, still sitting around somewhere. The removal tool cleaned it all out. And now that it’s all gone, I can interact with the external hard drive, from my laptop. Whooo!

The Moral of the Story

The moral of the story is two-fold:

1. If, for some reason, you can’t access your network shares, and you’re getting a bizarre “Not enough server storage is available” available, check out the Microsoft article discussed above. It may or may not solve your problem.
2. If you’re having trouble removing a stubborn Norton antivirus troll from your system, remove it completely with the Norton Removal Tool.

The combination of these two steps (or perhaps just the second step; I’ll never know) was enough to let me get back to where I was originally headed – to being able to make an image of my work computer on an external drive hosted by my desktop. Phew, what a trail that was to follow!