[Animal]

Had a similiar experience myself.

Just finished re-installing XP, and downloaded SP1. Everything went fine, next was to load Zone Alarm and Norton 2004. Everything was great until I hit Norton, and the darn thing just wouldn't start, it kept shutting itself down.

After about 5 re-installs, I tried one of those online virus scans, and low and behold there it was. It appears that everytime I downloaded SP1, this nasty little bugger came along with it.

I only really clued in when I was looking through the running processes and noticed something unfamiliar. It wouldn't let me open System Configuration, Help and Support, Norton and a few others. Since I'm running NTFS, the Norton Rescue disks were useless, so I headed over to Symantec on another PC and downloaded the removal tool for it. That's the great thing about Norton, if NAV can't remove it, they usually have tools on the website to get rid of it.

I don't recall the exact name of the little critter, but dig around a bit on Norton's web site and you should be able to come up with a solution that doesn't involve a reformat.