Recently installed Norton Anti-Virus 2004 and the Norton icon has (until now) been happily displayed and enabled on the system tool bar (or whatever you call it) in the bottom right corner of the screen. Today, for some reason, I turn on the PC and there is a red 'X' through the icon indicating Auto Protect is disabled. I can no longer enable it because when I right click on the icon that option is 'in grey' (i.e you can't click on it). Equally, if I click on "Open Norton Anti-Virus" nothing happens. Norton doesn't load. Nor does it load if I try clicking on any icons in the Norton folder (in Program Files). I uninstalled the program and re-installed it fom the disc but the problem is still there. One weird thing though, I wasn't asked to 'activate' the product, i.e I wasn't required to enter my product key when I re-installed it. Maybe that's normal...I don't know. In any case, it's very frustrating. Does anyone know what could be causing this problem? Any help would be fantastic. Thank you all.

there are some virus' that disable nortons. go to www.symantec.com and open the security tab, and run the online virus scanner. or you could run the prescan from the nortons disk, altho it won't have all the updates

See if maybe you had a virus or a trojan get past you and disable your anti- virus program . Try running Stinger its free and will get rid of all the nastys then uninstall Norton and reinstall and do all your updates again hers the link. http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

I have already done the online scan and the prescan (twice)! I followed all the instructions on Norton's help site to the letter and the problem remains exactly the same. I don't think it's a virus or a trojan. Nothing has been found with any of these scans or with Spybot etc. Any other ideas? Thanks.

Hmm.. Try to see if you can get updates for your norton anti virus. The reason I say this is because I once had a problem with norton firewall. It would seem like its on but its not. Infact it was disabled.. sometimes it would show (disabled) and sometimes it wouldnt show up at all (the icon in the system tray). The reason for this is because there was a faulty update from symantec that caused norton firewall not to respond hardly. So just try to update if you can. If that dont help you could always try uninstalling it and reinstalling it. Can't please everyone.

Did everything suggested but to no avail. Have now started using alternative software. Thanks for the suggestions though.