Your symptoms sound like the Troj/JetHome virus we encountered recently. Norton "broke" the virus, so it couldn't reset our home page, but the "broken" virus code gave us a persistent error message. It took some substantial cleaning before we got completely rid of it.

Unfortunately, this is one (if it's what got you) that requires editing the Registry for complete removal.

The Sophos site above gives the clearest description, but you may want to also consult Norton's site for more complete cleanup instructions. Norton calls this virus js.seeker.

Note that even the Norton instructions are incomplete. You need to get into regedit and search for all occurences of the "target" homepage that the virus substituted. You can probably safely delete any "key" that contains the name of the "new" homepage.

John