he is planning on getting his own computer VERY soon. his dad is crazy.

 

I would reformat too

 

Are you in safe mode?

If not, There is a virus/trojan/spyware running that deletes hijackthis when seen.

 

disable the norton firewall. i gurantee that does the trick. norton firewall sucks donkey balls.

 

i was not in safe mode when i was trying to extract it.

i did, however, have it already installed from another time i was over his house working on his machine, and then it mysteriously disappeared. that would explain it.

 

Is your dad running a hardware based router? If so remove Norton Firewall and turn off the XP Firewall. The hardware based router will do more than both of those and if you have the XP based (Sp2) firewall installed IT will conflict with Norton.

Also get rid of McAfee, those commercial programs never do you really any good and you will fight with them more than not, as in another post I said go get a great free one called avast; http://www.avast.com

 

anyone who is familiar with IT security will tell you that a milti-tier approach to firewalls is the most secure. hardware firewalls can be gotten around and so can software.

the biggest problem here is the norton firewall. norton's firewall is a huge problem maker because the only indication it gives the operator is that annoying popup that most people just click "ok" on without reading, effectively locking themselves out of their computer eventually. once you have blocked something it's a PITA to unblock it with Norton. The entire norton suite of products for that matter are garbage with the exception of anti-virus and it's marginal at best.

settings>control panel>add/remove programs>uninstall norton firewall>reboot ftw

 

With a GOOD router and it setup properly it will do exactly the same thing as windows firewall or even a commercial like Norton. I have a Linksys WRT54G and it has more bells and whistles and I have it setup very well and trust it more than I do the Windows firewall or any commercial one.

Get around it? I'd like to see that. You could ping flood me as you could with any other router, and the ports that I have open will do you absolutely no good

 

I have the same router. The router firewall only protects from the public WAN side. Circumventing the WAN side of a wireless router is remarkably easy. Both WEP and WPA protection can be cracked in under 10 minutes if someone knows what they're doing and if an attacker is on your LAN, what good does the hardware firewall on the router do? Absolutely nothing. As i said before, anyone who is familiar with IT security will tell you that a multi-tier approach is best.

 

brad fixed it! ya!