[Pastorious]

Hello again,

I have the Classic OS Icon on my menu bar. When I stop classic from running and the go to check for mail in Mac mail a horrible distorted noise happens. I recently installed Norton's AntiVirus. Would this be anything to do with it as this is the only thing that's different with the machine since this started to happen?.

It may be nothing to do with classic, it seems to happen when I click on the get mail icon in Mac mail.

Cheers

Pastorious

[ast3r3x]

It may have nothing to do with norton either, but you should still uninstall notrton

[Pastorious]

Hi ast3r3x

Thanks for replying. I have been getting the same noise again but it is only when you stop classic from the icon on the desktop.
Is having Norton on the machine a bad idea anyway or should I uninstall the OS9 version of Norton. I don't want to go unprotected.

[ast3r3x]

I don't know what to say, I've never heard that before. I don't know if norton antivirus is bad, but utilities is definitely bad. Does the sound happen more then once or is it just after you quit it does it once?

[scratt]

I am with ast3r3x here...

Although I have always had Norton on all my machines it does have some very serious issues and when I have had occasional catastrophic failures on the Mac I have been able to 99% track it back to Norton.

One example was just after installing the latest version I lost all of my email with that weird bug / 'feature' in Apple Mail that seems to lose your current inbox contents after a certain size... The cause (I think) was that I had forgotten to turn off Norton Autoprotect and it had rejected half a dozen emails (rightly so). They had viruses and were Spam.. But unfortunately whatever it did when it quarantined them blew Mails tiny brain and I had to recover from a backup made earlier that day... BECAUSE I KNEW I WAS GOING TO INSTALL A NEW VERSION OF NORTON!

So... Why do I use it? Habit, convenience. I am used to Norton. Have always used it. Have trashed drives stupidly running Speed Disk on OS X even though you don't need to - Back in the early days of OS X... But in the end (for me - And I suspect I am the only one) the problems and length of service with this 'thing' have now outweighed any thought of going elsewhere!

Once you have learnt the hard way with Norton there are some cool things about it that I do like.. End of story. But believe me it is a wierd and wonderful learning curve and don't give Norton ANY RESPONSIBILITY AT ALL OVER YOUR SYSTEM.... Treat it like an errant child!

[Brad]

Step One: Uninstall anything related to Norton.
Step Two: Manually remove anything related to Norton that the uninstaller might have missed.
Step Three: Never ever ever install anything related to Norton ever again.

Norton Utilities used to be a good suite of software years ago on the old Classic Mac OS, but with the introduction of Mac OS X, the developers really dropped the ball. Norton Utilities and Systemworks were complete disasters for Mac OS X. They caused many users more headaches than ever, being the source of all kinds of problems from damaged drives to regular systemwide kernel panics.

Norton is a thing of the past, anyway, a tool of a bygone era.

Antivirus utilities are pointless on Mac OS X unless you use Classic regularly and happen across one of the very rare 40 viruses for the old Mac OS. Compare that to the known 60,000 for Windows. How many for Mac OS X? Zero and don't forget that. Norton Antivirus, as I recall, is the part that has historically been linked to kernel panics and problems with system updates.

Disk defragmenters and "optimizers" like Speed Disk are of very little relevance with the larger disk sizes and the updated filesystem controller in 10.3. Mac OS X 10.3 automatically defrags files less than 20 MB on the fly and even moves most frequently accessed files to a hot-file area of the hard drive. Smart! Compare that to how Speed Disk just blindly lumps all system files together in a section of the drive.

Disk Doctor is the most infamously damaging of the suite for Mac OS X. I myself had to reformat my drive twice because Norton hosed it back in the early OS X days before it was well known that the new versions of Norton were steaming piles.

Moral of the story?

Never ever ever install anything related to Norton on your Mac.

I don't know if this is the source of your current problem, but it may be the source of others now or in the future. Know that you've been advised.

[Brad]

Oh, and I'm also moving this to the Genius Bar since it's more of a technical support issue.