Gurney -

We gave up on ZIP disks quite a while back. We had multiple disk failures, and when a disk wrinkles up it often wipes out the drive. After about the third or fourth drive replacement (all still under warranty) we just quit using them.

The Kakworm is one of those that frequently carries a payload that installs "programs." Once it's executed, Norton may find the worm and kill it, but the "program" bits that it's installed technically aren't viral. Different strains of the worm can install different non-viral malware, and make different Registry and .dll entries; so removing all the traces, for all the varieties, is pretty tough. In all probability, Norton "killed" the worm, but you might still get indications of "calls" to non-existent executables (removed with the virus) indicating something was still there. Any other cleanup program may recognize bits left by a different strain of one of these, so it may clean out the residuals for a different few varieties.

One of the reasons for needing "real time" virus protection all the time is that any virus/worm can install unpredictable payloads, and no AV product can guarantee to clean up all the messes once the worm has been turned on and has a chance to do things to your machine. Norton should have detected and eliminated kak if Norton was in place and current when the infection arrived, and/or when the the file containing the infection was first opened and the worm attempted to do something. After that, Norton or any other good AV can kill the worm; but it's a crap shoot whether Norton, or whichever other AV you get, can clean up the specific payloads that your particular worm delivered. Often it takes more than one program to clean up the mess, regardless of which one you start with, if you install any AV program on a machine with existing infections, or if you only run your AV after the worm has done nasty things to you.

John