I Really, Really Do Not Like Norton Anti-Virus

Regular readers may recall a post I had not long ago where I three in the towel and removed Norton Anti-Virus from both my machine and my mother’s machine though we each had several months left on our subscription. I had been a long time user of Norton – since long before it was bought by Symantec, but the package had made both my machine and my mother’s painfully slow to open files and to turn on. I’m talking about ten minutes to boot up when you turn it on. (I have a lot of memory, so that’s not the issue.) Also, every so often, the computer would simply freeze up and stay that way until the machine was turned off, which then means sitting around waiting another ten minutes for it to boot up again.

I tried the CA product, which was offered for free by my ISP, AT&T, found it to be adequate for my needs. I also bought a copy for my mother so she’d be on the same package I am. (She often has questions that are easiest to answer on the phone if we both have the same package.)

Recently AT&T indicated to me it was time to update my anti-Virus package, so I hit OK, and next thing I knew, a) it uninstalled CA and b) it installed Norton. It seems now AT&T is providing users with Norton. Imagine my delight.

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Update.

My life just went from bad to worse. I installed the CA product. Then I tried to delete Norton. I went to add and remove programs and removed everything that said Norton or Symantec. And yet, when I boot it up, there it sits! The previous time it was easy to uninstall this thing. According to the add/remove program, there is no Norton on my machine, yet it boots itself up and is sitting right there at the lower right of my toolbar, smugly slowing down my computer. Anyone have any ideas how I can get this thing off of my machine?