Upon arrival I quickly noted that her husband’s PC was on the same cable connection as her computer was connected and that he had no problems connecting to any of the sites in question. I noted that she did not appear to have any firewall programs actively running on her computer and that her anti-virus (Norton) was current and up to date. From the DOS prompt window, I ran the "IPCONFIG/all" program to detect the PC’s IP settings. As expected, all settings appeared normal, otherwise how could she be downloading her e-mail and visiting all the other (non-secure) Web sites?

Well, appearances can prove to be deceiving as I found out about a half hour into this project. Glancing at the computer’s program file menu I noted that there was an entry for Norton Personal Firewall. The program did not appear to be running, but it had been previously installed on the computer. I asked the customer about this program and was informed that the subscription for Live Update had expired the month before, so she simply turned off the program rather than paying to renew the subscription. As we started asking questions about the timing of her inability to connect to those secure Websites, she noted that the problem started about the same time as she had turned off the firewall software.

I attempted to run Norton’s firewall software to check the configuration, but was told by the program that I needed to be an "authorized user" with "supervisor privileges". Since I was logged on Windows XP using her name, I switched user names to the only other user on the computer, that of her husband. But the program still wouldn’t let me run it to check the settings or even uninstall the darn thing! It appeared that our only choice was to pay for an upgrade or new subscription in order to be able to run the program. After searching Symantec’s FAQ knowledge base on their Website, I found that this problem had happened to other users before her, and they had a special program that would remove the firewall from her computer (all versions of Norton’s Firewall software) including reversing the registry entries and deleting the files from the hard drive.

After removing the program using this tool (and they have similar tools for System Utilities and Anti-Virus as well), I was able to start accessing any Website the customer desired. The bottom line to this story, was that she should have uninstalled the software rather than simply leaving it turned off. The program apparently left a module running in the background that defaulted to blocking all secure (Https:) connections. I must note that the same software was run ning owner husband’s Windows98 computer without causing this problem, so perhaps it was a combination of the version software and her Windows XP Home edition operating system which caused this unique conflict.

Pay Them Now, or Pay Me Later. But plan on paying more for cleaning up after the problem than you would for preventing it in the first place. If you don’t keep up the subscriptions to your software, especially your anti-virus program, eventually you may end up paying me later to fix the problem. On the average, over half of my service calls continue to be caused by folks having expired and out of date anti-virus definition files on their computers and getting infected. The new viruses are continuing to come out on a monthly basis, and if your anti-virus software hasn’t been updated this week, you are probably vulnerable to a computer virus and ought to put back a few dollars in your family or office budget to allow for a visit by myself or another computer consultant to clean up your computer’s virus infection.

Lee Besing is the owner of Computer Solution Experts and a senior partner with Digital Fortress.Biz. He can be reached by email at besing@acomputersolutionexpert.com. If you have any questions you would like to be answered, feel free to send him an email.