Want to try AVG but just can­not get rid of Norton's per­sis­tent antivirus that itself behaves like a worm? Here are some instruc­tions that have worked.

So you want to use Grisoft's AVG Free as your antivirus, but had Nor­ton antivirus installed before, which is now prov­ing more per­sis­tent than a flat­u­lent release in a bath, with Symantec's whole con­vo­luted she­bang only com­pound­ing your woes? Well below is a sim­ple sureshot way to get rid of Nor­ton for good.

1. First, from Start –> Cpanel –> Add/Remove pro­grams, remove every trace of Nor­ton and its asso­ci­ated pro­grams, which means scan through the list of installed pro­grams for any item that says "Nor­ton" or "Syman­tec" or "Live­Up­date" — for exam­ple "Syman­tec Live­Up­date" or "Nor­ton AntiVirus 2003".
2. When you are absolutely sure that these ver­mins are gone, it is VITAL that you reboot the com­puter. When you are back into XP, delete the fol­low­ing fold­ers man­u­ally — if they don't exist that's fine:

   	c:\Program Files\Symantec AntiVirus
   c:\Program Files\Norton
   c:\Program Files\Symantec
   c:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared
   

   Do a SHIFT DELETE if pos­si­ble, the fold­ers don't go into your Recy­cle Bin in that case, so they are gone from your com­puter for sure.

3. After the above, I usu­ally clean the Win­dows Reg­istry for any entries that are lying around stray. Get a Reg­istry Cleaner like HoverDesk's RegSeeker (zipped down­load) and use the "Clean the Reg­istry" option.
4. Once that is done and you have SELECTED ALL and deleted the stray items, reboot again. To be sure.
5. Nor­ton should be gone when your machine is back up. If not, Syman­tec has a brute force util­ity called RNAV2003 — get it here, which ought to do the rest of the scav­eng­ing, but it shouldn't come to that.