Getting home from the holiday was the usual fun - drag everything in, unpack all the bags, put the washing in the baskets for the washing fairy to deal with... In addition, this time I had taken the cunning step of powering just about everything in the house off before we left, which meant that things like the heating and the internet needed switched back on. Which was all fine.
Except for one thing: my PC resolutely refused to connect to the internet. Everything else on the network was fine, but not that.
It's been a while since we had PC troubles, but they haven't become any more fun in the interim.
Debugging the problem quickly established that the issue was with both wired and wireless connections, and indeed applied both when using the home network and if I turned my phone into a mobile hotspot. That pointed to a software problem, or just possibly a problem with the motherboard.
Long story short, I finally isolated the problem to Norton Anti-virus, with the advice being to uninstall it and reinstall it. Which was great, except that Norton make it really hard to uninstall - there's a "why do you want to uninstall?" question, after which they send you a suggestion for something to try instead. Presumably, after that there's a "no, I still want to uninstall" option.
But, of course, the key problem with that is that the "suggestion for something to try instead" comes online, which requires that you be connected to the internet. Given that I was trying to uninstall because I couldn't connect to the internet, this was something of a problem.
Fortunately, if you reboot your PC in Safe Mode this then allows for an easier uninstall without those additional hoops to jump through. After which I could reinstall the program and whatever the problem was was cleared.
Still, that seems a really bizarre and annoying weakness in their systems - we'll gate your ability to solve the problem behind the problem!
Anyway, it's done now. Which is nice.
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