On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 10:49 -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Andrew
> Maclean<andrew.amaclean@gmail.com> wrote:
> > One is running McAfee and the other is running Symantec Endpoint. It
> > does not matter whether the firewalls are on or off.
>
> Note that many packages for windows that do networking and virus
> scanning installed "wedge" dlls that are always part of the code path
> of the OS whether the firewall / antivirus are active or not.
> Uninstalling is the only way to KNOW they aren't affecting your
> computer.
... assuming the uninstaller was competently written.
*ahem*logitechwebcam*ahem* . Sysinternals Process Explorer and regedit
for actually letting me find and remove that stunning piece of garbage
and its scarily buggy and badly designed hook/wedge DLL. (My webcam
driver broke Pg, gcc, and several other things.)
These days most virus scanners and software firewalls seem to be OK, but
a few years ago I used to have to manually remove leftover bits of
ZoneAlarm in particular from users' machines then reset their IP stack
("net interface ipv4 reset c:\resetlog.txt") to get their networking
going again.
It's still beyond me why anyone installs a software firewall on modern
Windows. The built-in firewall is _perfectly_ reliable and eminently
sufficient. It just works, and stays out of the way. Why replace it with
something that's inevitably buggy, less than perfectly integrated, and
too busy proclaiming to the user "I'm doing something, I'm doing
something".
--
Craig Ringer