Norton Internet Security 2009 Error 3039,1

22Apr09

After uninstalling my Symantec Norton Internet Security 2008 (NIS 2008) from my Windows XP Pro SP3 system & installing NIS 2009, the Norton icon in the System Tray had a green check in it. After about 10 minutes, the green check changed to a red X & brought up the Norton One Click Support screen showing Error 3039,1 along with instructions. I followed those instructions, rebooted & started a Full Scan but again, about 10 minutes after the reboot, the red X & One Click Support screen popped up again with the same instructions. I tried a variety of things including booting from the NIS 2009 CD & scanning for viruses (virii) & removing/ reinstalling NIS 2009; no virii were found & nothing I tried worked.

Symantec's WebChat support was polite, professional, friendly & persistent but not effective in fixing the problem. Over a long afternoon/evening, several support people remotely examined my system, reproduced the problem, offered to backgrade me to NIS 2008.5, asked if I wanted to pay $100 to have viruses removed & reinstalled my NIS 2009/SystemWorks Basic Edition 12.0. I lost the connection with the person who recommended NIS 2008.5 -- none of the other support people knew anything about it. I didn't want to pay $100 for a virus scan since I had just paid $70 for NIS 2009 Premium (the NIS 2009/SystemWorks Basic Edition bundle). The person who reinstalled NIS 2009 / SystemWorks very carefully removed all traces of the old NIS 2008 & my reinstalled NIS 2009 from my system, so both of us were surprised when the red X appeared once again about 10 minutes after reboot. This last support person transferred me to his supervisor (my guess is that's a term for a different support person), and I waited an hour in the Symantec queue before researching the problem myself.

I had checked the web for "3039,1" before but was not too comfortable checking different websites with NIS 2009 with a red X. When I Yahoo!-searched again for 3039,1 , I found a Norton community bulletin board message

http://community.norton.com/norton/board/message?board.id=nis_feedback&thread.id=13671&view=by_date_ascending&page=25

pointing to another page

http://www.macropool.com/en/download/mdac_xp_sp2.html

describing how doing a MDAC Repair on Windows XP SP2 (also works for SP3) which would fix this problem. I tried the procedure & it seems to work -- before, my system would go for at most 10~15 minutes before switching over to the red X; I haven't seen the red X since & have run my system for 2~3 of hours at a time.

My opinion is that Symantec, as a company, has a few "opportunities for improvement" here. Why would they intially write NIS 2009 to depend on MDAC, which seems to be an optional Windows XP component (my computer has run well for 6 years without it)? The Norton Community board has been writing about this problem since mid-October, 2008 -- why didn't anyone from Symantec engineering hear about & fix this dependency? And why didn't the polite, professional & helpful Symantec support people know to try the MDAC repair solution suggested in the Norton Community bulletin board? My guess is that more communication -- between customers, support & engineering -- is needed, and the support organization probably should copy this & other suggested fixes from the Norton community bulletin boards to their things to try/fix database.