Windows XP SP2 and Norton Antivirus – configuration

In the visitor statistics info for my blog, I’ve noticed a high number of Google and other searches coming in over the past few weeks looking for configuration information on Norton Antivirus (NAV) and the Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) upgrade.

The reason my blog gets included in such searches, I guess, is due to the posts I’ve written about XP SP2 and NAV.

If you’ve got my blog in your search results, here’s the info you need.

If you use Norton Antivirus 2004, 2003 or 2002 (maybe earlier versions as well) and upgrade your XP installation with SP2, one of the things that happened is that the new Windows Security Center would report either that your antivirus protection is disabled or that it couldn’t determine the status of NAV. (Check the image at left to see how it looked on my PC when I first upgraded to SP2.)

This behaviour is nothing to do with Windows, it’s to do with NAV and was fixed by Symantec a day or so after SP2 launched in the first week of August.

What you need to do is manually run Symantec Live Update so it can upgrade the WMI component of NAV. Even if you have NAV configured to automatically get updates, still run Live Update manually – the auto-update feature gets the latest anti-virus definitions but not necessarily updated program components.

Once you’ve got the update, what should then happen when you restart your PC is that you’ll get a dialog on screen asking you whether you want NAV to report its status to Windows. The default option is no: if you accept the default, you’ll continue getting the Security Center alerts, so choose yes. Then, you’ll see that the Security Center is able to monitor NAV correctly.

More information from Symantec:

Symantec | Windows XP Service Pack 2 information center