Vista and Norton Internet Security not playing well together

We had one computer where the trial version of NIS had expired so we loaded one license from a 3 pack of NIS. Prior to loading it, I believe we ran the Norton removal tool. Everything went well.

We had a second laptop running Vista home premium and did the same thing.

The problem was that the Windows security center was complaining that there was no firewall and no malware protection. I found some indication that rebuilding the Repository would fix the situation.. OOOPPS.. Windows crashed and had to do the good old repair thing.

OK once the machine healed iteself, I did the norton removal tool and reinstalled NIS. I'm not sure if we lost a license or not. Norton was shoing the "Fix me" button until I ran liveupdate. Now everything is working great.


Update 3/2/08 - The laptop rebooted because of a Windoze update and the old "Firewall is disabled and no malware" message is back. Vista and Norton just don't want to play nicely. It appears that the firewall is active and that the malware protection is working. So, I suppose my options are

1. Spend a lot of time trying to figure this out
2. Ignore it by changing windows to say "I'll monitor things"
3. Leave things as is for a while and see if the folks at either Microsoft or Symantec figure out how to make things work
4. Go to another AV although I've already purchase a 3 pack of nis 2008 and only used 1 license.

My vote is for option 3. I am going to run some port scans to make sure that the firewall is actually working

Accessing a shared printer on a domain pc from a 'logged on to this machine" PC

Sometimes the impossible just takes longer.

I had a situation where a number of users were set up to "log onto this machine" instead of logging on to the domain. We are in the process of converting everyone to log onto the domain for ease of maintenance and security considerations.

The problem was that one of the employess just got a new box. I was converting that user from a machine logon to a domain logon in the process. They were sharing a printer/scanner to a number of other users.

The problem was that no matter what I seemed to do with permissions, most of the users could not see that printer when I tried to add it.

A little more research revealed that users who were logging onto the domain were able to see the printer but people logging onto the machine were not.

The solution turned out to be to go to the machine with the shared printer, go to computer management, go to users and set up individual users on the machine with a user ID and PW that matches the credentials used for the network. This is admittedly a less than optimal solution. However, it got the resource avialable until we are able to convert everyone to a domain login.