Help with Firefox (Now Rag on Norton) >>

[Ciro]

Well, for a while now I've had to keep deleting these two extensions for my firefox.

One is called Gamevance Text Links
and the other is Norton Toolbar

and it doesn't matter how many times I say "Disable" or even if I freakin UNINSTALL the damn things, they won't go away.
I even attempted to manually delete them from my firefox folder... but nothing happened. Or either that or I just did it wrong.

But the point is, they won't go away, and I want to uninstall them forever, cause I don't want them on my computer =/


Any ideas or suggestions?
If all else fails I guess I'm just gonna have to reinstall firefox, which I REALLY don't wanna do since it's memorized a lot of passwords and websites already...

[11clock]

Gamevance? That website gave me adware before. Have you been getting ads popping up randomly when you switch websites?

[yottabyte]

Seems like some programs running in the background that keep adding them. If you have Norton antivirus, the Norton Toolbar is kinda obvious. Idk about the other one tho.

[Chaos]

Uninstall Norton.  Kill two shitty softwares with one stone.

[11clock]

Seems like some programs running in the background that keep adding them. If you have Norton antivirus, the Norton Toolbar is kinda obvious. Idk about the other one tho.

I think I have an idea on the Gamevance thing. Check your program files and see if you have a folder called Gamevance. If you do have it, then you must delete it immediately. There is a program in the folder that generates ads when the internet is open!

[Ciro]

I've deleted the gamevance folder, and even uninstalled it from my computer, so it would make sense that it would disappear, but it hasn't o-o


And no >> I'm not deleting Norton, it's a freakin $200 program and the only virus protection I've got on this computer. I just don't want the damn toolbar for Norton on it, and I don't really wanna mess with the settings.


And, I have been getting pop-ups, but from random places, they're not constant, so I dunno if it's Gamevance's fault or what, cause normally firefox is pretty good at holding back the pop-ups.

[Chaos]

Congrats on paying $200 dollars for what practically amounts to a virus itself.

[Cactuscat222]

Spybot Search and Destroy or AVG Free, ftw.

On that note, Norton IS pretty much a virus. It installed itself on my computer, and every attempt to uninstall it, it reinstalls on next startup. I had to go through some hefty processes to get rid of it...

[Scotty]

My biggest beef with norton is actually pretty ugly on their part. One of their software, believe it was their firewall, screwed a girl's Internet over (oh, and she had some HUGE cajungas!). The paid subscription ran out, and she didn't renew it. Because of that, the software disabled her Internet connection. The only possible resolution was to remove it. I rember reading about that exact problem before, but thought it was too outrageous to be true. I was wrong.

[Ciro]

Well shit.. this doesn't help me at all! D:

[Chaos]

Stop being lazy and go into Norton's settings and disable the firefox extension?  -_-

[Ciro]

Uhh.... and how would I do that?

[yottabyte]

Why are everyone picking on Norton? I'm gonna use it when my F-secure license get outdated in April. I heard it's better than F-secure, at least...  :-\

Oh ontopic, maybe you could.... what chaos said  :P

Google is your friend. I found this (from Norton 2008)

Johan has a good workaround, as follows: After playing about for a bit I tried an old trick, close all instances of firefox, go to the components folder as mentioned above, and remove the coFFPlgn.dll file. Create a new empty file, name it the very same, coFFPlgn.dll and set it to be read only.

[Lucifer]

I know I know I know!
Use Chrome instead.
/helpful

[Scotty]

Why are everyone picking on Norton?

Norton has a bad rep due to an awful history of bad implementation.  It's most notorious downfall was how it would eat system resources as though they were scrumptious chocolate chip cookies.  Any time it would do a scan, it would devour processors and memory rendering any other system processes useless.  This is unnecessary for what it would accomplish, as it often proved that it was a lousy anti-virus and by comparison to other anti-viruses, wouldn't catch a damn thing (partly due to the fact that they are one of the most renown, so viruses were built to exploit holes in it's definitions.  Much like how software engineers primary target is M$ as opposed to *nix).  Another problem was its uninstaller.  You would have to remove it via Add/Remove software as you would any other program, then you would also have to download and use a Norton software removal tool because they couldn't get all the traces removed via the uninstaller that came out of the box with it.  People also reported that after uninstallation, traces of Norton were still present and caused B.S.O.D.'s, rendering computers useless. 

There are many other smaller complications that came along with it, everything from their firewall software blocking the internet if the subscription expires (as I explained above), to it destroying desktop backgrounds and then reporting it as a virus, to just flat out frustrating you to the point of lacerating fluffy bunny's throats.

All that was written in past tense, because I have not touched Norton or McAfee (another culprit) in years, and I've heard some people say they've gotten better, but quite frankly, I'd rather not be the one to ruin a computer out of curiosity to see if they ever got their act together.