I am running WinXP Pro with all SPs up-to-date, zone alarm firewall and Norton AV with auto update, plus regular Trend Micro housecall scan. Sent an email to someone and he told me the email got a virus. He is using Avast AV program and since it is free, downloaded it and checked my disks. Sure enough, found the Kelvir-B worm and Istbar trojan virus.
How come two big-name AV programs like Norton and Trend Micro missed them while a program that I heard of for the first time can catch them? It is getting ridiculous having to run 3 AV programs to get some decent protection.

 

Norton is poo. OK, so antivirus apps. aren't going to catch everything all the time, but the past few years Symantec seems more interested in getting an annual subscription out of consumers rather than improving their products. Avast! regularly catches stuff Norton misses when I clean up machines for people. Housecall is also probably not too difficult to hide from if you know what you're a decent virus coder.

You may have better luck if you start in Safe Mode (with networking support) first before using it. Or take a look at building a bootable CD-ROM like UltimateBootCD so you can run a complete "offline" scan on your system.

 

As above not keen on Norton ex McAfee employee here and still use it

It can also depend if you are getting all the Norton updates
Some AV software has trouble downloading Updates if you are using pop up blockers dont ask me why ???

And Trend House call my not have been upto date either I guess

 

Another thing, before the virus were deleted by Avast, my WinXP security shield pop up was warning that my Norton AV was disabled, whereas the Norton icon itself showed it was enabled. After the cleanup, the warning disappeared. Is this virus related?
My complaint is that a commercial AV program like Norton which is on a paid subscription basis should be able to do better than a freebie from a small company, otherwise it is not going to get too many renewals. My Norton auto updates is scheduled on a weekly basis and for Trend Micro Housecall, the virus database is downloaded just before the scan, so it is the latest available from them.
The PC now has to load Spybot, ZoneAlarm, Norton AV & Ghost, and Avast at start up, talk about overheads.

 

The worm or trojan probably disabled Norton's Real-Time protection. Also, don't run two "active" AV programs on the one machine such as NAV and Avast! They don't tend to like it!