Advice, please

I bought a computer about a month ago from a foreigner leaving. I’ve since gotten internet hooked up at my place and was using my computer no problem. Only thing was that the guy had installed Kerio Personal Firewall, which was driving me nuts. Anytime I’d want to download anything (especially from utorrent), I’d get a million messages asking if I wanted to allow the connection. I suppose there’s a way to disable that happening, but I just figured I’d delete the firewall and get ZoneAlarm, which got some decent reviews online.
So I deleted Kerio, then afterwards downloaded ZoneAlarm. When I restarted my computer, it wouldn’t connect to the internet at all. It boots up fine, but just the internet won’t work. A friend told me I’d probably have to reformat my hard drive b/c I hadn’t uninstalled Kerio, I had just deleted it. I really don’t know much at all about these things, so maybe if you all have some experience with this, it’d be a great help to me. Thanks for any advice.

That would be an extreme measure.

Most likely you haven’t deleted the bits of Kerio that make it actually work (which are likely to be separate from the application you control it with). The easiest thing to try would be installing Kerio again, and then uninstalling it (rather than deleting it). If you run into problems while trying to reinstall Kerio, you may need to delete some registry keys. See this thread:

forumz.tomshardware.com/network/ … 13295.html

Deleting the registry keys might actually fix your problem anyway … but reinstall-uninstall is a cleaner and easier approach.

If none of that works, and you can’t find anything with a google search that’s similar to your problem, then the next step would be to reinstall Windows, straight over the existing installation. That’s fairly painful (you have to reinstall drivers and stuff), but nowhere near as bad as a reformat.

I don’t know if this advice bares relevance to your situation, but using Norton (Nobody should ever use Norton, it’s crap!) If a program such as bittorrent, skype, msn etc is updated to a new version, Norton keeps asking again and again and again and forever if the program should be allowed. It doesn’t matter how many times one “allows” it, another annoying popup will come along in another ten seconds to ask again. There is a simple sollution to anyone having this problem though. You go into the Norton menu and find something labelled “worm…blah…blah” I forgot. Anyway there is a list of allowed programs, one in the list is most likely the program that it keeps asking you to allow. Anyway you simply have to remove the problem program from the list and then close the Norton menu. Norton will come up with one more annoying popup which you will choose “allow” once more and then no more problems should persist again. Oh, well, until you update another program, and then another popup will just keep on popping until you do the same again with that program.

Since the next option is formating the drive I don’t mind offering this advice,

Installation usually is in more than one place , since you have upset the balance by deleting a single component, try deleting all instances.

Run Msconfig by clicking on your bottom left thingy and there is an option to run, type msconfig, then on the last two tabs search for instances of the program and uncheck them. You are disabling the boot up of the program if they are there.

Go to c:\Windows\System32\drivers and delete any reference to this program.

Also go to C:\Windows\System32\Prefetch and delete any reference to this program.

WARNING

You may seriously fuck your system up. But if it has the the name of the program you want to delete your probably ok.