Daughter's brand new HP XP laptop started acting up after three days. HP XP means HP's brand name on the laptop with factory installed XP rather than Vista. A clueful software whine (C:/blahblah/yaddayadda/symantec/S32EVNT1.dll has failed to initialize) started to appear when ever Fprot antivirus, Civilization, or Simcity was launched. Since daughter and laptop are scheduled to depart for Krygystan in a week (Peace Corps) I decided to see what was what.
Googling for "Symantec" and "S32ENVT1.dll" and "failure" brought up a world of hits. Apparently this problem is widespread. After reading a bunch of hits, the story begins to unfold.
Laptop had come from the factory with a "free trial version" of Norton Anti virus. Due to a bad rep, extreme sluggishness and irritating cost we had uninstalled Norton and put in AVG.
Turns out that Norton Antivirus doesn't uninstall properly. It leaves some trash in the registry that causes the S32EVNT1.dll error. Going to this helpful website: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Norton_Removal_Tool_SymNRT_d4749.html
guided us to a special Symantec written cleaner-upper program that swept the trash from the registry and all Symantec software right off the computer. It then plead for us to re install Symantec products but we didn't fall for that pitch.
Laptop now works perfectly.
Why do I have to troubleshoot brand new Windows XP systems? Why is Windows so damn tender that it needs antivirus kludges to exist, and is so additionally tender that said anti virus kludge breaks Windows?
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