When Firewall/AV Software Misbehaves

I have a good friend who called me to his house to look at his computer. He had been having consistent problems with it, running slowly and not hitting the internet as it should. The internet issue was especially noteworthy - on a DSL connection he was seeing connection speeds around 3.7 KB/s, which is slower than my lowly dial-up connection at home.

One thing that was happening very consistently is that a program called ccApp was dying every single time he rebooted the computer. A little research showed that this was the Norton Internet Security Control Center. This is not an application that you want to have blowing up when you have a DSL connection.

So, to solve that much of the problem, I stripped it from the system and installed ZoneAlarm and AVG antivirus. There are free versions of both, and the licensing allows for home use. As soon as I stripped Norton from the system and loaded the other applications, his DSL connection suddenly began to work like a DSL connection - 180+ KB/s download rate, and everything seemed much more stable.

I would have expected a slight slowdown with Norton, but nothing appreciable. That his DSL connection was reduced to the status of a bad dial-up is something that merits more investigation.