I've learned my lesson
Okay, I've finally learned my lesson when it comes to Symantec crap.
On Sunday afternoon I woke up and went to my computer that had been running all night like usual. Fifteen minutes before I had to leave for work I realized that my Norton Personal Firewall icon was missing. This was strange as I had it enabled and configured the taskbar to always display it. I opened up the program and saw that every setting was turned off. This didn't make sense as I would never do that. Strange, but no problem I thought as I clicked Enable. Nothing happened... I checked my NAV settings and saw that those too were disabled. I started to worry a little because.. well my computer had been up for who knows how long without any protection. I tried configuring the settings but the program denied me access. With about 7 minutes left til work, I desperately uninstalled the firewall and reinstalled it. The same thing happened. Also, I could not connect to the AIM servers. Not wanting to leave my computer on without a firewall I shutdown my computer for the first time in a couple months. I came back and had no success with trying to fix the program. And so, I took the easy way out and reformatted my drive, and reinstalled Windows. I did this because now all my internet settings were messed up. It took me a while to finally connect to AIM, I could not connect to ICQ or IRC. My Internet Explorer could not retrieve pages and I couldn't check my mail.
I could be wrong in placing the blame on Symantec but I've had it with their bloated software. Well, that episode is behind me and my new Windows XP installation is fully configured to my liking but I have yet to choose an antivirus and firewall. I have reinstalled Windows for the 5th in less than 2 weeks now and I noticed that it starts up and shuts down really quickly until I install NAV and NPF. I want to try a different firewall. One that works in similar ways to NPF but is not bloated and hogs resources. The only thing I really want is reliability with simplicity. Honestly, NPF would've been nice if it didn't take forever to start up and shut down. But I like how when a program tries to access the internet for the first time it asks me to Allow, Deny, etc. That's all I really want. Any suggestions?
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