My uncle came today with his laptop - he said that he suspect it’s infected with some kind of virus.
Took a quick look, and found Norton Internet Security. I instantly got the hunch that this will take some time to take care of.

Indeed… took me about 4 hours to fully clean the laptop. The laptop was in a very bad condition; it was infected with about 130+ viruses. Norton Internet Security however didn’t give a single warning. Everything is okie-dokie, according to it. Totally useless junk.

The Internet connection was hosed too. Looking around, found on asus.com website that this is caused by doing a system restore. Yes, the virus is messing around with XP’s system restore feature, and while doing it managed to cripple the modem too.
So I downloaded the 10 MB modem driver (no small feat here with Indonesian’s puny internet access), uninstall the modem, and reinstall it again.
Voila - working Internet connection.

Back to Norton Internet Security - I’ve decided to call this piece of junk “NOrton internet Useless SEcurity” (NO-USE).
I uninstalled it completely, then installed AVG anti virus and ZoneAlarm firewall. All free, and all works MUCH better than NO-USE. Shame on you, Symantec - and you call yourself a security company ?

A few years ago I got NO-USE for free from my bank (Barclays) when they first introduced their online banking facility. It was a trash back then - it destroyed my Windows installation so thoroughly, I had to do a clean reinstall.
It has managed to do a bit better now, I didn’t have to reinstall this laptop. However, letting viruses slip past its firewall, and then failed to spot 130+ viruses in the laptop ?
It still sucks, big time.

Stay away from it. You’ll thank me for that.

Addendum:
Here’s another reason why it sucks. Unbelievable.