okay, for a while now, i've been having problems with my "auto-protect" function in norton antivus. many times when i boot up my computer, the "auto-protect" is disabled. in the past, i would just manually enable it after i boot my puter, but now i can't even do that anymore. and when i go to the configuration screen to check to boxes for enabling auto-protect on startup, and click OK, i get an "unknown error" message. now i've uninstalled the program, deleted all the hidden folders associated with that program, and reinstalled the program many times, but my computer continues to act the same way. i use this same program on my laptop and several other computers in my house and none of those computers have this problem. so do you think some mallicious code may have entered and infected my computer sometime in the past that is causing this symptom?? i've scanned all my drives for viruses using the lastest definitions, and one time i detected a few .class files (which i don't ever recall having openned them), quaranteed them, and deleted them, but still nothing changes. so does anyone have any idea as to what may be going on with my puter?? i'm contemplating on formatting my drive and reinstalling everything, but that will be a last resort...

 

Several worms/viruses are known to disable AV software. This could be your problem. I'm not sure how you'd figure out which worm/virus is causing your problem though. There are so many of them & you'd have to check for each one. Starting over may be quicker.

You could try putting the HDD from the bad computer into a known good computer as a second drive & scanning it with known good AV software. That way you would not be booting off the infected HDD when doing your scan.