Killing IAMAPP.EXE: Norton's lingering goodies . . .

I keep running into this one as friends and clients move away from Symantec in greater and greater numbers . . .

When you uninstall Symantec Software, it never really seems to go away. It leaves frustrating little fragments of itself behind, and sometimes whole modules. Norton Firewall seems to be particularly troublesome; it will give you the folowing warning at startup:

The procedure entry point SessionCLientProcessInitialize could not be located in the DLL -- NISALERT.DLL

This comes from IAMAPP.EXE, which, according to some of my research, can hide itself. Tricky, tricky. Oh, well . . .

First, uninstall Norton in ADD/REMOVE Programs, in the Control Panel.

Second, go into the registry and kill everything you find relating to Symantec or Norton in the Software nodes of the Current_User and Local_Machine Keys.

Third, go into the Program Files folder on your system drive; find the folder(s) containing files relating to Norton and/or Symantec, open each folder and delete the contents. For example, in the Norton Firewall folder, delete all of the files you can, one by one, until you are left with a handful of files that you can't delete because they are in use (You will see a warning to this effect).

Fourth, open Task Manager and kill all processes with names similar to the filenames you can not delete from Program Files.

Fifth, return to the Program Files folder and finish deleting the contents of the Norton/Symantec folders.

Sixth, delete the empty folders.

Reboot.

That should do it.