Back on the 27 May I posted an article about a number of users experiencing problems after upgrading to Windows XP SP3 whilst running Symantec security software including: Norton Internet Security, Norton AntiVirus and Norton 360, problems included deleted network connections, an empty Device Manager interface and thousands of bogus entries added to the registry. Last week it was reported that the same problem could also affect users updating to Vista SP1

On Thursday Reese Anschultz, a senior Symantec Manager, announced on the Symantec Support Forum the availability of their promised free tool, SymRegFix, this is designed to delete the unwanted Symantec registry entries

When some users on that same thread noted that the tool had not deleted all the spurious registry keys, another Symantec employee Steve Dang stated: “The other garbage entries may have been created by Microsoft’s Fixccs.exe outside of the Symantec registry keys”.

“If you have any other security applications, especially any that monitors/protects the registry, please disable those,” said Dang. “Then, open a command prompt and type ’symregfix /override.’ This will attempt to delete the garbage registry keys under the entire HKLMSystemCurrentControlSet hive, not just those under the Symantec registry keys.”

Symantec has also issued a patch via its LiveUpdate service that prevents the registry corruption from occurring, although users must run LiveUpdate from within their security software, then reboot the PC before attempting an upgrade to Windows XP SP3 or Vista SP1.

Symantec’s SymRegFix clean-up tool can be downloaded from the company’s Web Site.

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