RogueSpear

I've already spent such an obscene amount of time with their tech support for the issue that I described earlier, I would hate to spend that kind of time again only to be told "we're working on it." Would rather go through a root canal. I'm curious if anyone out there has seen a change log for SCS 2.01 or for SAV 9.01. Try as I do, I can't find any information. I suppose that's why I blow $2,500 a year for "Gold Support."

I'm going to be sticking with Symantec for those who already have bought it. The problems simply aren't severe enought to warrant change. It does after all stop viruses, etc. rather well. Also, I forgot to mention that my particular issue with ccapp.exe only rears its ugly head with the firewall client installed. SAV alone does not seem to have this problem. For those who haven't made the investment (yes there are some), I'll be recommending Trend. Give it a look. It's a pretty nice system they have.

I'll be darned. I never noticed this before. Exact same results on the pagefile over here. And I appreciate someone bringing it to my attention. This is just another straw on the camel's back with me and Symantec. Beware, slightly off-topic rant follows: If you are running Symantec Client Security V2 (this is the antivirus and the firewall client together), beware of the following KNOWN YET TOTALLY UNDOCUMENTED ANYWHERE BUG: Try this out. Install SCS2 on a Windows 2000 Server or XP Pro computer. Service Pack level does not matter. Boot the computer and when it gets to the CTRL-ALT-DEL screen do not log in. Now initiate a Remote Desktop session to the computer from another computer. Have you noticed just how pokey everything is yet? Take a look in Task Manager. CCAPP.EXE is pegging the CPU. Now log in to the computer locally, that is from the keyboard. Now initiate your Remote Desktop session. Everything is fine. I spent over a month of back and forth e-mail, several extended tech support calls, and several weeks of the most indescribeable aggravation imaginable trying to diagnose why only sometimes would the CPU get pegged. Finally Symantec admitted to me that this is a known issue and in fact is the very reason that they do not officially support the firewall client end of the product on a server OS (since people generally terminal service to a server rather than sit down at it). So I asked why this was not documented anywhere that even a front line tech could find it, and got no answer. I asked if this was currently a priority issue they were trying to resolve. I was told in so many words that Remote Desktop was a new feature and it would take time to work it out. A NEW FEATURE?!? XP has been out for over THREE YEARS. Windows 2000 Server? What like 5 1/2 years now? I have often bet my a** on Symantec's products and have recommended their products to countless people, individuals, private businesses, government agencies. I'm starting to feel a little like the guy in my avatar for making those recommendations. And that's too bad, because other than this issue and profoundly terrible documentation, I have always found Symantec's products very competent and of high quality.

I know that this can be done in batch quite easily, but what can I say? I'm a VBscripting weenie. I'm just more comfortable in that environment and whenever possible I try to avoid using ws.Run in favor of native code. I run into enough machines that still have a pretty dinky hard drive but are otherwise perfectly viable XP machines. So I have implemented this as part of my post setup routine. I use this just prior to an initial hard disk defrag and then setting a static size page file. This gives the best chance of having a completely non-fragmented pagefile on those HD space challenged computers. Please note that the double whacks (\\Program Files\\ and \\Windows\\) are necessary since we are using WMI. That's why I didn't simply use the common environment variables for each.

Just made a little improvement in case there is an interest. I made a subroutine to disable NetBIOS from all network interfaces. The inspiration here is a Sierra Wireless AirCard 555. When you install this card it creates two DUN entries and a NIC adapter with NetBIOS getting it's setting from DHCP. So even if you disable NetBIOS in your WINNT.SIF file, once you install this adapter (or the Cisco VPN client by the way), NetBIOS can still run if DHCP calls for it. Personally I like to ensure that NetBIOS is never enabled. It's a bandwidth waster and a huge security hole. I have noticed better throughput VPNing with the AirCard if NetBIOS is totally shutdown. For the tray icon subroutine, I added the ability to specify the DNS suffix to the interface "Local Area Connection". Not entirely necessary, but a nice feature when working in the enterprise. Don't forget to change the strDomain = "MyDomain.Local" to whatever your domain is.

@EclipseGSX I must have missed the mail notification that this thread updated. Yes, if you leave out the AntiSpam from your command line nothing will go wrong. You just wont have the adblocking features of the firewall.

Superb piece of work Ryan! Thanks much for all the time I'm going save. The more I save better

The dash - represents deleting the specified key from the registry.

@ToBe I think how it works is the key has a correspondence to the PID inside the SETUPP.INI file. I don't know why this all has to be so complicated. I'll have to see if MS will issue me a VLK for TabletPC under my current Select License.

I built myself an msi file today for Nero 6.6. I used InstallShield Repackager, using the single step snapshot method. I also made a seperate msi file for the Vision half of the product. The msi file for the Nero end of the product came out to 35.5MB, which kind of surprised me a bit. I thought it would be smaller. I did test out burning to a CD-R and DVD+R and all went well. I haven't tested every conceivable function however. I will begin testing on the vision msi over the weekend. From Nero proper I removed ImageDrive, BackItUp, Cover Designer, and SmartStart. I did leave the audio applications as they generally suit my needs. From Vision I removed the new Photo utility, Media Home, and ShowTime as I prefer Photoshop, Winamp, and PowerDVD. After the repack for each product was done, I had to go through the generated registry info and meticulously remove all of the extraneous entries for the removed applications . I'm going to need reading glasses for sure now. And I'll just bet ya they come out with a new version to fix some initial bugs any day now. Maybe next time I'll just run Reg Checkup to find all the invalid settings and use the resulting log file. The changes I made to the install may not appeal to all. I always install Nero products to \Program Files\CD-R. Thats where I install all CD-R related programs. And the shortcuts are in the All Users menu under CD-R. I'm rather "type A" with my folder and start menu structures in case you couldn't tell. I don't have any hosting space currently, but if anyone wants to host it, I'll edit the msi to remove my key code and upload. It's obviously to large to email, so requests for emailing it can't be fulfilled.

This will leave out the help for both clients and the Lotus Notes snap-in for SAV. Note that the "AntiSpam" is necessary for the ad blocking portion of the firewall. There is no antispam functionality however. It seems to be a leftover from Norton Internet Security 2004 code. This is straight from the Client Installation Guide by the way, which I think you can download from Symantec.

Here is the tray icon thread.. The other settings are contained within the tweak file in the first post of this thread.

If memory serves me right, you can set the community names / access and the trap destination through the registry. The e-mail part I think you'd want to set on the server side of things and doing that via registry is something I'm not familiar with. To get all of the proper registry keys you could open up the ADM files (located in the inf directory) with notepad and do a search for "SNMP". There will even be explanations about each registry setting, albeit not very helpful ones.

I ran into a similar situation as yours when my primary employer aquired several Gateway Tablet notebooks. Gateway supplied a recovery DVD that also appears to be PE based. It appears that a file, SETUPP.INI, located in i386 is at least partly responsible for the setup routine determining which XP (Corp vs. Tablet) will install. Ultimately I would love to have a single RIS image for both installs. My line of thought was to use different answer files for each install. Then I was trying to figure a way to get Tablet to install using my select license key to avoid having to bother with activition and all of its ugliness. So far I have not succeeded in that endeavor. What I have settled for at the moment is this: I made a second RIS image of Windows XP from a slipstreamed SP2 CD. I replaced the SETUPP.INI file in the image intended for TabletPC with the SETUPP.INI file from the recovery DVD and used one of the keys from a TabletPC in the SIF file for that image. It does work. You can RIS TabletPC 2005 just fine. You're stuck with activation however, and I've had some problems with it. Someone who is two levels of rank above me fancies himself as an advanced computer expert but is really nothing more than a neophyte. Well he found a BIOS update from the OEM who actually supplies Gateway with the computers (Gateway simply sticks their name all over it). He applied the BIOS update and it changed everything so dramatically that the OS locked itself out, demanding reactivation. When he tried to reactiviate, he was basically told no way. So eventually I had to boot this thing up with ERD Commander to flash it back. The whole thing has been a pain in the neck. I'm seriously just considering installing vanilla XP SP2 on these computers since NOBODY EVER uses the tablet features. Anyway, enough of my rants. I hope this helps you out some. BTW I did find some interesting information about the SETUPP.INI file over at www.tech-hints.com. I just haven't had the time to mess around at all with the information I got over there.

I just packed this up to an msi file yesterday and it seems to be working fine. I don't have any hosting space at this time so let me know if you want me to email it to you.

How about putting IEAccess=off in the winnt.sif file?

I've searched a bit but haven't seen this one posted yet. Nothing earth shattering, but could be useful to somebody.

As long as we're sort of on the topic of applying HKCU settings during install... I have one setting that flat out refuses to take unless its set after the XP setup is complete and rebooted. Its the small icons setting. What I'm using is Anyone else have this difficulty? Or is there another setting / method to accomplish the same thing?

The /autoupdate switch does work. Unfortunately, the documented /autoimmunize switch does not. On a side note: I repacked Spybot to an msi file. It's pretty nice since all of the settings are the way I want them in an enterprise setting. And during the repack process I ran the autoupdate so that when the msi installs, the program is at least as up to date as my repack. I then used the machine startup script to schedule spybot to run daily under the local system credentials (in which it autoupdates, autochecks, autofixes, and finally autocloses). If it runs under a user that is restricted, it can't remove registry settings of crapware in HKLM.

Moo named some of the best. No need to repeat them. One other one I use a lot is NTREGOPT. Its a freeware registry defrager and even has decent command line support. I originally found this over at Softpedia.

Try the old REBOOT=ReallySuppress trick. It ought to work since the installer uses msiexec.

MRU-Blaster is a freeware utility made by JavaCool (makers of SpywareBlaster). It claims to clean out over 35,000 different MRUs. So it covers quite a bit of 3rd party software. You can set it to run at each boot and to run at intervals; say once every hour if you like.

The drag and drop feature in V9 is certainly long overdue. I almost forgot that we couldn't do that before. Anyway, I would suggest installing SCC on a workstation that you do most of your management chores from. It works just fine under XP SP2. In fact I made my own mmc console that includes SCC with all of my MS admin pak consoles all in one.

I use InstallShield Admin Studio, but only because my primary employer bought it for me. Otherwise its just too much money. Years ago I used WinInstall, LE which I think was provided free in the Windows 2000 Resource Kit Tools. It doesn't have a ton of advanced options or anything, but MRU-Blaster is a very simple and small program, so it should handle it without any difficulties.

I deploy Java through GP quite a bit and the only way to modify things when you deploy that way is either direct msi editing or creating an mst file. I really prefer mass deployment through a GPO since you can later recall the application with a couple mouse clicks.