The hard drive in my son’s computer was recently upgraded, so I had to reload all software onto the new drive, including Norton SystemWorks. Immediately after SystemWorks was installed, the dial-up connection window appeared and continues to appear every few seconds. The fix suggested by the Knowledge Base at Norton, is to enable ‘Never dial a connection’ in the Internet Options (which is a pain), or to delete a value in the registry (which is not present in my registry).

As the Knowledge Base article suggests, the most robust solution for this problem is to enable ‘Never dial a connection’ on the ‘Connections’ tab in the Internet Options. This will mean you will never be prompted to dial a connection when an application requests access to the internet. Instead, the only time the dial-up window will appear is when the user double-clicks the connection icon to initiate a connection.

However, you mention this solution is a pain, presumably because you like the prompt to appear when opening legitimate internet applications (such as Internet Explorer or Outlook Express). Since the program causing the problem seems to be Norton SystemWorks, it appears SystemWorks is attempting to access the internet. Make sure automatic updates is not enabled in the software, as this could be causing SystemWorks to request access to the internet thus causing the dial-up window to appear.

Unfortunately, apart from enabling ‘Never dial a connection’ I do not have any further suggestions for fixing this problem. However, I strongly recommend you scan the computer for spyware and adware, in case the problem starting when SystemWorks was installed is simply a coincidence, and the real cause is malware installed on the computer. Download and run Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition (www.lavasoft.de), Spybot Search & Destroy (www.safer-networking.org) and, if you are running Windows XP, Windows AntiSpyware (www.microsoft.com/downloads). You may also wish to run a full virus scan in case the problem is, albeit unlikely, virus related.