Problem with firewall

[rsxr2002]

Its not really a big deal but ever since I installed Norton Personal firewall 2003, it takes about a minute or two for the firewall icon to appear in the system tray once windows is loaded. I cannot use the internet or check email etc.. during that 1 minute of load time. My computer has plenty of ram, plenty of hardrive space, I have Windows XP Pro, and I have a 2.5 GHZ processor. Its never been this slow with loading before. I tried uninstalling the firewall and my computer boots a lot faster so the problem is definitely with the firewall. I don't think there is any other recently installed software that could be causing this slowdown. Any ideas on how to get it to boot up faster?

Oh, By the way I have norton antivirus too, which takes the same time too load as the norton firewall (they load at the same time). But the antivirus used too boot instantaneously without the firewall installed. Any help would be appreciated.

[glc]

The only machine I have ever worked on with Norton Firewall did the same thing. Zone Alarm takes a while to load on this machine too.

[rsxr2002]

the weird thing is that my roomate has almost the exact same computer I have with similar software, same operating system etc... and there is no lag time for the Norton firewall to load at startup for him. oh well...

[Blakhart]

Pitch the norton and just run the native xp fwall. It is far faster, is more secure, and probably far more stable as it is native to the os. (it has gone through all the M$ testing). It is all I run unless the box is a 98/me or Linux install

[glc]

The only thing the XP firewall doesn't do that others do is monitor outbound connections. That's all I set up for my broadband customers with XP that aren't using routers - the native XP firewall.

If you insist on using Norton's firewall, you must turn off the XP firewall, having them both going could be causing this.

[rsxr2002]

nope thats not it becuase I turned off the XP firewall after I installed Norton. Thanks anyway.

[Lord Prism]

Perhaps bootvis would speed things up?

http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/platf...ot/BootVis.asp

Uncompress the file.
Run BOOTVIS.EXE
For a starting point, run Trace / Next Boot + Driver Delays
This will reboot your computer and provide a benchmark
After the reboot, BootVis will take a minute or two to show graphs of your system startup.
Note how much time it takes for your system to load (click on the red vertical line)
Then run Trace / Optimize System
Re-Run the Next Boot + Drive Delays
Note how much the time has decreased

It may or may not help. good luck,

[rsxr2002]

Thanks Lord Prism. Unfortunately it only reduced the boot time by about 3 sec. However, BootVIS showed that the "Logon+Services" are taking about 55 seconds (making a total load time of about 80 seconds), whcich is what is what is causing the slodown. Is there any way to speed that up? Im pretty computer illiterate so I apologize if this question sounds stupid? .

[Lord Prism]

Here are some services you can set to MANUAL or Disable:

http://www.a1-electronics.co.uk/Gene...psTweaks.shtml

http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/service411.htm

This page has some General Performance tweaks that include Services streamlining:

http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/performance_tweaks.asp

HTH
Good Luck,

[rsxr2002]

Thank you very much Lord Prism. Unfortunately more bad news. At tweakxp.com, there was a tweak that addressed the Slowdown for Norton Internet security. I got excited. It said to change the ip adress to 192.168.0.1 and the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 (Note: Im not sure why this works, but it does). And walla, the computer boosted supefast.....but I can't use my internet connection now becuase its an invalid ip address. So, I changed the setting back to "Obtain ip adress automatically" and the load at startup is a slow as hell (as it was beforehand). Damn, I was so close to fixing the problem. Oh well, Thanks anyway Lord Prism. At least we narrowed down the problem to the ip address. Now what?

[rsxr2002]

Okay, the problem is sort of fixed. It turns out Symantec knows about the problem, but is unsure why it happens. Something about the "Common Client Program" is causing this. They offered a remedy here.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...pcode=nav&svy=

For me, the load time is still slow, but it is a lot faster than before. If you have any updates on this Common Client problem please let me know. Thanks everyone for your help.