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[gripe]
A few months ago various people tried to help me solve a problem on my laptop:

XP problems

I didn't get anywhere at the time and have lived with the issue since.

Finally a couple of days ago I decided enough was enough and tried a variety of free things like Spybot, Ad-Aware, Malwarebytes, etc. None of these found anything wrong. Norton hadn't found anything but was giving lots of warnings.

So I decided to give Norton's Power Eraser a second chance. I ran it and it found just one suspicious file - "wmiacpi.sys". (I suspect I must have clicked the wrong option when I tried it before.) It asked whether I wanted to create a restore point before taking action. I said yes and the system was cleaned. The problem now seems to have been solved. Except for two small things.

When I closed down the laptop it took ages because of 57 Windows updates (I'd noticed there hadn't been any updates recently but hadn't associated it with the virus issue).

Then when I booted up this morning, Norton helpfully informed me that the restore point files were infected (presumably because the infection was removed after the restore point was created). If it can do that why can't it detect the file in the first place??? The next step was to remove all the restore points. Now that's been done everything does seem OK.

Final question: if Norton's Power Eraser (a free download extra once you have the basic service) can find the file why not include that functionality in the main software?
[/gripe]

My laptop does seem clean though.

So is your issue that you are concerned that you still have a virus or whether or not you should keep using Norton?

Personally I gave up on Norton after I discovered that my one's scans skipped all of the files that I told windows to stop blocking, it was mainly games, I too was simply recieving notifications without any action being taken, finally I conceded defeat and took it into Sony (it was still in waranty) they switched me over to AVG and it was sorted in less than ten minutes.
If I were you I would switch over to Kaspersky internet security, it's cheaper, faster, better at handling issues and (unlike Norton) acctually removes suspicious files when it finds them.

Also after looking over that previous thread it looks like you have (or had) a pretty serious problem, I'd recommend what they recommended, just back up what you need and wipe the machine if you are still having the same issues.

Hope that that helps in some way, although I'm not too sure what it is you're asking

After looking online, it appears that file (wmiacpi.sys) is easily compromised and can cause system issues.

Considering it's been several months since you first reported the issue, it's possible that your scanning tools have updated definition files since then and may have just not known how to find it back then.

Neither of those. I was mainly reporting progress and having a gripe about Norton at the same time.



May be, but why don't they find it now? I've done a complete scan several times and find it hard to believe they updated their data on the very day that I chose to use NPE.



It was intended to be a gripe not a question - the question, such as it is, is for Norton.

I've used Kaspersky and MacAfee in the past and K was dreadful. I've used Norton for some time now on various machines and this is the first time I've had a real issue with it (there were minor early issues till I understood how Sonar was working). I'd be surprised if other software didn't have their own issues.



As I said, I'm not. The remaining issues seem to be down to the well-documented problems with older Compaq laptops.