In all honesty, who the hell didn't see this coming? It's like a story I read about on b3ta: Bunch of people get sick at a restaurant, health inspector is called in, finds many problems, restaurant owner /tries to bribe the inspector with free food from the restaurant/.

What surprises me is why other AV vendors aren't jumping in and waving their products, effectively kicking Symantec out of the Chinese market. "Had enough with Norton? Here's a free one-year copy of AVG."

Also, kudos to El Reg for the 'cockroach salad' idea. Marvelous, and made me chortle plenty.

On the net they say

"If an affected PC was rebooted, Windows failed on start-up and showed only a blue screen"

Was it netapp32.dll and lsass.exe, lsasrv.dll and not lsass.exe or was it netappi32.dll and lsasrv.dll ?

My own Laptop has no XP disc just a recovery function to defaults.

Some iso bootable CD with an NTFS writing ability and possibly the admin password hack, is the recovery console even installed by default?. Someone could go round ressurecting PC's at high speed without all the hassle.

Continuing to use Symantec as you installed it so your computer wouldn't crash to a blue screen and wipe system files, be it a Thousand or a Million that were infected who would want a free year?

Symantec- The place where old programs go to die!

I dont run AV as such on my home PC, I use whats called my Brain 1.0 Simply install Firefox, Ad-aware and Spybot, update and scan after a browsing session and I do browse lots of porn sites also to test the effectivness of this setup...lol Each weekend I do an online test at Trend Micro and I also install AVG, scan and then uninstall and the only time there was an issue was when I tried IE7 and immediatly got trojan'd!! Back to Firefox I went :) I use online mail such as Yahoo and Hotmail who scan all attachments for me, how do these muppets get infected? Nothing is foolproof but its mostly to do with the fool sitting at the machine.

Corel should buy Symantec, or vice versa, just to complete the cycle. Then they can be the whole useless security/backup/multimedia elephant graveyard.

Man who lies down with dogs

Gets up with fleas