Norton 2008 irritations

Ok, so Norton 2008 takes it upon itself to automatically restrict any program from connecting to the web until you confirm that it probably won’t explode your computer. This isn’t too big of a hassle, until one of those notices occurs while you’re attempting to login to a game’s account server, ala Battlefield, when the game isn’t currently alt-tab-able and it JUST FUCKING SITS THERE until I eventually push reset and go punch my cat.

Is there some hidden option to turn this off? I want virus protection, not hobbled pets.

You can’t whitelist the executable in advance?

Or how about the better solution of uninstalling Norton?

No?

Or how about the better solution of uninstalling Norton?

If there’s a way to stop Norton from going all overprotective nanny on my games I’d rather like to keep it for the AV protection.

UPDATE: I found a prevuously unseen tab and checkbox for “monitor suspicious activity” - could this hold the key?

Use AVG instead of Norton. Problem solved.

Seriously, though, Norton seems to have gotten more and more annoying over the years. I don’t use it, but my grandfather does, and I’m constantly having to fix things that go wrong. I also have to manually update it every now and then because the auto-update doesn’t work.

Am I the only person who sees “Norton” and thinks of the college textbooks?

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must realize that Norton itself is worse than most viruses. At least a virus is likely to be transparent.

Anyways, I would recommend getting rid of it. It’s the first thing I do on a new computer, followed by either putting in a reasonable free antivirus like AVG or, preferably, an awesome unobtrusive one that costs 30$ or so like NOD 32.

Probably not the answer you are looking for. But it can’t be said enough.

My wife had so many issues with Norton Internet Security that I uninstalled it and threw it away. Then I installed AVG - voila, problems solved. Norton has gotten bloated and intrusive over the years, and it’s now at the point where it causes more problems than it would potentially solve.

I presently run ZA, AVG and Ad-Aware, and exercise care with email. Firefox with No-Script also helps.

I run norton 05, if you go to options and Internet Worm Protection, you should be able to manually configure program exceptions. That’s what I did with Sins and it works fine now.

Norton is, at this point, basically malware. My mother had it installed on her laptop and it was a constant annoyance. Every freeware virus buster I’ve used has been immeasurably superior. Norton didn’t even kill the viruses the computer picked up - it just smugly boasted about how it had blocked an attack and helpfully provided a tally of how many viruses it had collected and not got rid of. Terrible.

Bingo!! Seriously, Norton is a piece of overpriced, resource hogging crap.

To reiterate the point, I was asked to help out when the computer at work no longer could recieve e-mail. Turns out that Norton’s e-mail protection, from one day to the next, had decided to block the connection. Only solution was to turn off e-mail protection altogether. Which, you know, has the side effect of not protecting the computer.

Fuck Norton.

That problem exists with all antivirus email scanning features and usually manifests itself with timeout errors caused by the extra delay of scanning-as-it-downloads. There is no side effect of “not protecting the computer” since you have the real-time protection still.

With norton, it happens all the time. Other virus scanners? not so much. The real-time protection does not help, because it doesn’t kick in until you’ve already opened the virus email, which could be too late. Of course the real question is, why aren’t you using thunderbird/firefox?

to the op of the email issue: once you’ve fixed it, you can turn it back on without it cutting things off again, of course, the problem could recur again later, usually due to a temporary internet outage.

I’ll give a vote for uninstalling and installing Avast! (www.avast.com). I’ve been using it for years and have never had any problems.

Perhaps I’m confused about the issue, but I’m using NIS 2008 (and have used Norton products back when I had Norton Utilities running in DOS) and don’t seem to have the same problem. Everyone seems to be focusing on NAV here, but I didn’t think that NAV (the anti-virus portion) had any impact on whether a program accesses the net or not. That’s the function of the Firewall in NIS. In the General Settings of the NIS options in the Firewall section, there’s a number of different controls which tell the program what to do when another program attempts to access the net. Do any of those settings, or using custom program control, allow you to make any of the changes you want?

I have pretty strict controls for things, and I’ve set it to ask me about a number of different responses (rather than being automatic) because I like knowing what’s going on. But, as far as I know, those can be adjusted.

I wasn’t going to respond, because I thought the settings are fairly obvious (things like how to respond when a program attempts to communicate, or whether the program should automatically customize net access settings, or whether you want program launch monitoring, etc), but the discussion geared towards NAV and anti-Norton made me think I should at least mention them. I’m no fan of Symantec, I just happen to be one that hasn’t had much of an issue aside from them not improving their products often enough (and for killing PartitionMagic).