A blast from the past. Now when the kid's laptop boots up, it whines that EZ Trust antivirus is out of date and your computer is at risk, and the sky is falling. Back when the kid's laptop was new (maybe five years ago) EZ trust was the family anti virus, mostly because it had a cute picture on the box and was cheaper and less flakey than Norton. We gave up on it when it failed to update after a year, even after charging my Mastercard for a new year's subscription. Then the maker, Computer Associates got into some dreadful scandal that made the Wall St Journal.
So, five years later, some trace of the old antivirus is still lurking in the depths of the hard drive and the registry. A google for "EZ Trust Registry" brought up a raft of hits several of which gave good clear instructions for cleaning EZ Trust off for good. There were nine disk files to delete and a couple of registry keys. Some of the disk files were in use, and Windows Explorer refused to delete them, but a trick file zapper (GiPo_Moveon_Boot) took care of that. I made several passes with regedit looking for "virus" and "EZ Trust" and deleting every key that referred to EZ Trust. There were a lot of them.
Next I tried to go on line to make this blog post. Arrgh, Internet is dead. I reseated the network cable, powered cycled the cable modem, and futzed around. Then I tried a "repair connection" option inside Internet Explorer. Bingo, pay dirt. IE reported a layer in the network stack with an EZ Trust name was bad and would it be OK to remove it? I quickly clicked "yes" and every thing started working. In fact the computer is livelier than before.
Lessons learned. Antivirus programs suck up ridiculous amounts of CPU time and burrow deep into Windows. They don't remove cleanly, you have to clean up after them.
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