[jot2003]

Hi,

I run WinXP Home with Norton IS 03, with firewall and antivirus. A week ago I noticed AV was mysteriously shutting down its auto protect ability all by itself. A few days ago, the Norton icons disappeared from the icons in the bottom right. I tried to run NIS, but it said I was not logged on. So I logged on a supervisor, and tried to activate security, but nothing happened.

This is extremely frustrating since it is hard to find advice on what to do when the buttons do nothing.

I also cannot enable auto-protect.

You may think this is more of a NIS issue, but something else strange has happened. I cant run msconfig.exe, I get the message "Operation cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. PLease contact admin."

But I AM the admin. I am the only user, and I have the only account. I've checked and it has admin privileges.

NIS says there are 3 user accounts in operation, mine, a guest ("not logged in") account with restricted abilites, and one that says ASPNET. I've no idea what this is.

I've checked task manager and services for suspicious looking processes/ services. Restarted, NIS and auto-protect, rebooted PC plenty of times, done windows update. Ran virus scan and killed 18 w32.kwbots, ran ad-adware and spybot. I'm at a loss.

I even installed ZoneAlarm free firewall, but it has disabled itself. I get the same message about restrictions on the computer. So it's now been uninstalled!

I can't get to msconfig in anyway, which is bizarre. I can't believe someone can block me on my own PC.

I am on a university network, but I don't think they would do something like this (why would they want to?).

I simply don't know what to do!