Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

I’ve had Norton SystemWorks 2003 installed on my PC for a few years and I’ve renewed my anti-virus subscription each year to keep up. This year, for some dumb reason, when I saw the subscription was $40 at Symantec while NAV 2006 cost about $10 at Amazon with a Symantec rebate coupon, I decided to buy it. First mistake.

First problem, you can’t just uninstall the NAV portion of Systemworks 2003 in order to install NAV 2006. You must uninstall the entire program suite. So I did that. Then I installed NAV 2006.

First thing it did was quarantine two perfectly safe and important pieces of keylogging software I had installed on my PC: ActiveWords and BlazingTools Keylogger. When I tried to restore them the default folder it chose was my Temp folder. I instead chose to restore them to their original folders within my Program Files folder.

But after restoring, neither program worked. Previously, each one had been in my Startup Tray so they could work properly. Now, they were no longer in the Tray. I checked in msconfig and Keylogger was checked as a program to start when I logged in (yet it wasn’t appearing in the Tray). ActiveWords didn’t even appear in the file list as a program that could be loaded in the tray. Also, when I logged on to my computer, I got this error message concerning Active Words:

Cannot find import. Dll may be missing, corrupt or wrong version. File ‘ddao35.dll’, error 26

I could not load ActiveWords at all. I COULD manually load Keylogger, but it would not log keystrokes which is it’s job. So essentially both programs must be reinstalled. Doing so is a hassle because I will have to secure a key or ID allowing me to do so.

I understand why NAV might’ve thought these were spyware programs since they log keystrokes. But since these are common everyday programs which people do use on their computers, why couldn’t NAV have asked me what I wanted to do w. them instead of quaranting them by default?

As a result, I now have to contact each software company & redownload their program. A total drag I guarantee…

I have changed my default settings for scans to have NAV ask me what I want to do w. files it flags rather than allow NAV to make this decision. Maybe that will help in future.

I, of course contacted NAV support about the problem & they had absolutely nothing useful to say to me (the miracle of outsourced software [non-]support!).

I have very important suggestions for all three of these software companies:

1. ActiveWords and Keylogger, if they don’t already do this, should strongly urge new users to change their NAV settings to exclude their software from scans.

2. Before doing any scan of a new NAV user’s computer, the software should ask the user whether there are any files or folders which the user does not want NAV to scan.

Any of these warnings would’ve helped me avoid the pitfall I fell into today.

Tags: spying

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 6:08 PM and is filed under Blogs-Tech-Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.