I tried reading some other posts with similar issues; however, I did not see anything about this particular problem or how to solve it -
A couple of weeks ago I needed to renew my subscription for Norton Security Suite. Instead I decided to upgrade to Norton 360 - a massive mistake! After ten days of constant intereference and crashes, trying to get help from Norton and other various nightmares, I uninstalled the software using the uninstall utility in Win XP Pro. When the system went to reboot it displayed the following error message:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing:
\Windows\system32\config\system
I know that this refers to a missing registry key and that the likely culprit was something to do with how Norton attaches itself to every other program. My system is a Dell XPS 400 and Dell does have a utility to return the system to factory specs. But, this erases everything and sets the system back to how it arrived at my office - something that I would hope to avoid. I think I can repair the error if I could get a copy of the setup CD, but I don't know where/how to get this. All Dell can tell me is how to reset the system to the factory specs. Is there another way of doing this that would be less destructive? It is not really a matter of data loss - I am a maven about backing up my work - but, it will be a royal pain to reset all my software and other settings. Any help will be very welcome. Thanks!
