Pruning the right-click menu?

[Heretic Apostate]

Recently, I've experienced a problem whenever I right-click on a file to open it. (For why I do that, I am trying to open TXT files in Excel. MOO3 stores game data in tab-delimited TXT files, and they're easier to read in Excel.)

Trouble is, when I right-click on a file, it takes something like 30 seconds for the right-click menu to open up.

I'd like to know what is causing this. I suspect it has to do with Norton Antivirus, because a lot of programs that I use (Excel, Word, Outlook) are slow to load anyway (since they're tied in to NAV's auto-detect mode).

I think if I could prune my right-click menu, that might help. Right now, I have a WinZip menu and a Send via Yahoo Mail option on it, as well as the whole Scan with NAV option.

I'd like to get rid of the first two. I don't use WinZip, so I guess I could uninstall that. But how do I get rid of "Send via Yahoo Mail"?

And is there any way to get my darn computer to speed up? It was running fast not too long ago. But it seems to be getting slower and slower. I think it may be because so many damn programs are trying to access the internet whenever they load up. (I have Zone Alarm, and I rarely can open a program without it trying to access the internet... Darn annoying... I'll have to go back and prune a few of the permissions...)

Anyway, any help would be appreciated.

 

[Psionicist]

Indeed.

Today, approximately 12 hours ago, Norton Antivirus decided to stop working.

I moderate a large (32000+ users) computer messageboard. This happened to lots of people, at the same time. Symptoms include: NAV takes minutes to load, right click doesn't work properly anymore.

If you use NAV 2002, you can run live update and download a patch. As for NAV 2003, I haven't heard of a better solution than to uninstall the program, sorry.

Edit: Symantec will of course solve this problem for 2003 too, but at the moment they haven't.

 

[Henry]

Psionicist, is it certain to not be a new virus?

Just two days ago, my workplace was hit by a new variant of gaobot that Symantec did not detect. Gaobot among other things loves to kill vpc32.exe. It also gave norton the same symptoms you describe, plus knocking out the scan computer function.

We got rid of it, but it annoyed the heck out of me.

 

[Psionicist]

Psionicist, is it certain to not be a new virus?

Just two days ago, my workplace was hit by a new variant of gaobot that Symantec did not detect. Gaobot among other things loves to kill vpc32.exe. It also gave norton the same symptoms you describe, plus knocking out the scan computer function.

We got rid of it, but it annoyed the heck out of me.

Yup.

It happened to one of my computers, a small one, P2 400. Not connected to the Internet, doesn't really do anything but occasional word processing. I accidently noticed NAV had stopped resonding when I rerouted some TP cable.

 

[Psionicist]

http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/08/1849245.shtml?tid=126&tid=128&tid=172&tid=95

 

[Heretic Apostate]

Didn't work. It's still as slow to respond as before. I'm up to NAV 2003 v. 9.05.15. You're supposed to be able to get to version 9.06, but it's not downloading it...

 

[Heretic Apostate]

Correction: I've got the current version of NAV 2003. Apparently, as Psionicist has stated, it's a problem with NAV 2003.

Maybe I should uninstall 2003, and reload my earlier (and likely unsupported ) version of NAV?

 

[Heretic Apostate]

Oh, bugger this. I'm going to disable NAV whenever I need to actually do something.

Good bleaking grief! It took 10 seconds to open a 3KB file!!!! Some spreadsheets I work on hit 4+ MB. I can't have this happening, when I'm trying to work on my spreadsheets!

 

[Goobermunch]

For those of you who didn't read the Slashdot article, it's not NAV's fault. It's Verisign's fault. The /. article has directions on a work around. In a nutshell, just turn off . . . hmm, I don't remember what it's called. There should be an option that tells NAV to check office files. There should also be a windows update that will correct the problem.

--G

 

[gravyboat]

Very strange. This happend to me also a day or two ago. Whenever I would open up a MS Word document, the splash screen would hang there forever before finally opening the document. I suspected the virus scan that Norton Antivirus runs whenever I open up a Word document. So I turned off the office plugin in Norton Antivirus options. Sure enough, this fixed it and opening documents was fast again. However, whenever I would open any Norton program from within Systemworks it would take forever.

Here's a link from Norton's site about the problem...
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/sharedtech.nsf/docid/2004010810205113