To uninstall Norton software successfully, you need to concern about two things: Making sure it's fully closed; And Cleaning up all of its registry keys. Many of Norton users know clearly that none of these thow things can be done easily, as Norton provides with such a powerful protection in a way that it embeds almost every part of its services into your system, monitoring every operation and keeping every hazard away, consequently making users difficult to either disable Norton in its entirety or locate every registry key.
To shut down Norton, many ways are available such as right-clicking the tray icon to close background services or killing its process by bringing up the task manager with Ctrl + Alt + Del. But I think the most effective way to fully uninstall Norton should be getting into Safe Mode, in which you have an guarantee that neither Norton's services nor other programs that may have files associated with Norton will be loaded.
The second thing you need to do is to delete all Norton files and clean up its registry keys. Normally the major files and realative registry entries can be removed by Control Panel -> Add/Remove programs, provided that you do it in Safe Mode. But this does not necessary result in a complete uninstall, you may still get Norton services popping-up and, any attempts to re-install Norton or install other security software may be denied. In this case, try to find whether the following directories still exist in your system:
- C:\Program Files\Norton
- C:\Program Files\Symantec
- C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared
These folders are where all the leftovers of Norton are located and unless you delete them as well as their relative registry entries, you are not likely to successfully uninstall Norton.
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