Symmantec is on my list! Their anti-virus software breaks Networking on Windows 2000 when it is uninstalled. This must be a known issue, since I found other references to it on the web, and yet they haven’t released an update, even though they update their AntiVirus software continuously.

The long story is that I dowloaded and installed a trial copy of Norton AntiVirus a while back. Once the trial expired, I deferred the decision on whether to purchase it and uninstalled it to get rid of all the annoying popups letting me know that my trial is over.

Upon rebooting my machine, I found that I was unable to access anything over my network connection. My computer has been a bit twitchy about starting its network connections properly the first time, so I disabled and reenabled the connection to no avail. I tried various other things, like removing the network interface from the Windows configuration and rebooting so that it would re-create it, but still nothing.

I tried to force the computer to lease an IP address from the DHCP server on my network, and I got an error so I checked the event log for more errors. There I found that the DHCP service wasn’t started because a service it depended on called SYMTDI wasn’t starting due to a missing file.

Fortunately, I have another computer that Symantec didn’t mess up, so I was able to do a search on SYMTDI on Google. Near the top of the list was a page about someone else with similar problems, and their solution.

So, thanks to Google for finding relevant results, and thanks to Moshe Yudkowsky, for taking the time after fixing his own computer to create a webpage about his own experience with this problem, and how he solved it.

No thanks to Symantec for not fixing this problem (which seems likely to afflict anyone uninstalling this product) in one of their regular updates.