Norton Internet Security 2008 vs. Service Pack 3 For Windows XP

Windows users received another headache from Microsoft: Service Pack 3 is said to be messing up registry, and network connections disappear from the Network folder. Many users that experience such trouble have Norton security packages installed on their systems.

Microsoft claims that there is no problem with Service Pack 3 itself, anyone having trouble with Service Pack installation should contact Microsoft Support Center.

It seems that Microsoft is right, the problem is with Norton Internet Security 2008 that interferes with the new MS update installation. Forumers reported that installing Service Pack 3 on the computers that had Norton Internet Security 2008 installed (running and turned off) caused incorrect display of devices in Device Manager, incorrect registry entries (that began with "$%&") in Symantec's folder, and LAN adapters disappearance. Computers without Norton Internet Security 2008 installed were updated without any trouble.

Symantec also made its own investigation and concluded that it was not their fault. Sondra Magness claims that such problems may also appear on systems without Norton Internet security 2008 installed.

Dave Cole seems to have found an explanation. We finally got to the bottom of this last night," said Dave Cole, Symantec's senior director for product management of its consumer software. "All of these problems are related to the same thing: a Microsoft file that created all the garbage entries [in the registry]." His words sound true, as Windows XP Service Pack 2 also caused numerous troubles to users, suffice to mention KB893249 and 914450 patches.

In a support forum thread that started December 22, 2007, Shashank Bansal, a Microsoft engineer helping users troubleshoot Windows XP Service Pack 3 installation bugs, said: "This is a serious problem for us and we would like to investigate it to further depths. We would need help from all users on this forum for the same." Bansal then asked users who had had trouble updating from XP SP2 to SP3 to identify the process that had hung or had hogged CPU cycles. "Look out for cscipt.exe or fixccs.exe," he said.

Service Pack 3 was released on May 6, 2008, and is supposed to be the last service pack for Windows XP operating system.