firewall, norton and me

[bunnyt]

firstly thanks a lot to Firon and Switeck for their assistance/comments with regard to my problems in a previous thread - your help was most appreciated. u guys were right, of course, i don't have a router (only a vdsl modem that connects me directly to a LAN network) and i don't need to worry about port-forwarding. believe it not, now every time i check to see if my ports are open it is all green light and everything is go go go. hopefully my solution will help others who may be in a similar situation to myself - please read on even if you do use a router. i am a relative newbie when it comes to computers so you experts will probably immediately recognize where i was going wrong and what i should have done weeks ago.

well, it has been days (nights) of hand-wringing, hair-pulling and generally kicking the dog all over the place and finally i'm green light and go - peaking at great speeds on multiple downloads/uploads again. there has been much talk of firewalls and the such and so even though i thought i had everything (windows xp2 firewall) set-up correctly i decided to disable it and see what happened - still nothing. i had huge numbers of available and open seeds but my whole torrent list was stuck at 0kbs d/l and u/l. perhaps for a minute or so when i first opened utorrent a slot would begin to u/l then d/l but hit a pathetic speed of 0.5 or maybe even 1.5 before dying shortly after. i read somewhere that you actually might have to uninstall windows firewall to completely remove that obstacle so i went back to my security settings and sure enough even though windows firewall was disabled the firewall notification above still showed as on (green). i clicked that one and noticed that it was a norton firewall that was still enabled. now, i had been having conflicts with norton each time i started utorrent with a permit/allow box popping up every second or two (even if i did select permit !) until i hit the ALT-CTRL-DEL to shut norton down. while this did stop that box from popping up it did NOT turn off the norton firewall (as i was to discover) ! (i told you i was a newbie !) now, even though i had tried to play around with norton settings i never had much luck but finally i worked it out. this is what i did -

open up norton (norton systemworks premier 2005)

click norton antivirus (on the left)

click options (at the top)

click norton antivirus (in the drop-down box)

click internet worm protection (on the left)

UNCHECK (remove the tick) "enable internet worm protection (recommended)"

click "ok" (at the bottom)

another box then pops up with a warning and an option for a time limit to apply to this new setting (i chose to restore the protection on my next system restart while my puter is running only utorrent at night)

as soon as i started up utorrent and saw all was good and all those download and upload numbers fire up again it was time to party ! (after i had wiped the tears of joy away, of course)

so, a couple of points to finish off -

my computer may be at risk now but i started windows firewall back up and everything is still fine after allowing utorrent and TCP/UDP on the port i chose in utorrent in the exception settings. there are other ways to protect your computer - the list goes on but after reading up a bit (in forums like these) and speaking to people as well as checking the microsoft website, i have chosen spybot-search and destroy (free and recommended by microsoft, also i think it was firon who said he uses the immunize option of this) and ad-aware SE professional (recommended by microsoft) - this also has something called ad-watch which keeps an eye on things as you open them up too. spybot also has a very good forum similar to this one where there are experts to answer your questions and guide you through solving your problems. having had the frustrations i have had these past few days and trying to remove a nuisance trojan i found one particular thread to be most useful - http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=288 - this was a comprehensive computer scan where you save all the scan reports/logs and include them in a new post in the malware forum and the experts help you out.

well, hope i havent broken any rules here, please let me know if i have. hope i have been of some help to some of you. thanks again to the experts here who put so much effort into helping us out - it must get frustrating for you to deal with so many incompetent computer users like myself and yet you continue to be so patient - good job !

bunnyt

[silverfire]

Much easier solution:

Start Menu>Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs>Norton AntiVirus>Uninstall

Get a virus scanner that actually does something useful like AVG, avast!, or ClamWin.