I was just tinkering around online (AR15, eBay, downloading some files) and just happened to glance down at the icons on the lower right hand side of my toolbar. I noticed that Norton Anti Virus and Pest Patrol icons are missing. I always have these programs on, and they turn on automatically when I boot up.

WTF I think to myself (I almost always leave the computer on)...so I manually start up Norton and then discover that Auto Protect and Email Scanning has been turned off! I try to turn them both back on and the program will not let me do it. I can do everything else (view logs, run full system scan, etc) but not turn Auto Protect or Email scan back on.

Pest Patrol would turn back on, and operate with no apparent problems.

I rebooted, and now everything works fine. Did a full system scan with both....nothing found. I am a little worried because I had just finished an eBay purcahse and PayPal transaction. I typed in a few important passwords.

OS is XP.  Any ideas what may have caused this?

Just sounds like a little system burp. I get them sometimes too, but not very often. Update your Anti-Virus and Pest Patrol and do a full scan, just to be sure. Explorer.exe can cause that if it crashes, so just do a reboot if it happens again.

Thanks for the advice...I am still a bit puzzled though. Just a windows thing?

From my experience, yes, it is just Windows being Windows. Win98 did that to me too, but sometimes with a nice flashy blue screen and other times with an error window that wouldn't go away.

Same thing happend to me on friday with the added bonus of my firewall being disabled.    They would not turn on manually either  even after rebooting the first time.    I downloaded the latest and greatest even though the live update was enabled and then ran a full system scan.   Came up clean

Rebooted again and it's all ok.

 sheesh.....

Rip

There are some viruses/trojans that disable anti-virus programs. I've run across them while debugging a couple systems. Try an anti-trojan scan with TrojanGuard to be on the safe side.

I would have been conserned you got a virus or trojan as well, except you say after a reboot, you could start it all up.
Most of those that I run across prevent them from working until you get rid of the virus or trojan. Not only once.
Do a full scan anyway, but if it comes up clean, don't sweat it too much.

Thank you!