Since I’ve been trialing Norton Internet Security 2007 I’ve run with the phishing filter part of it switched off because it put a big banner across the top of my browser.

The banner takes up a lot of screen real estate plus I don’t think I really need it. (I don’t tend to click on links in email and its only function is to check that the site I think is Amazon.com is not really a known fake phishing site pretending to be Amazon. It doesn’t for example check that Amazon.com really resolves out to Amazon’s IP address. Also it tends to throw up false positives with some advertisers with embedded links within web pages.) But I think the main reason for disabling the phishing filter is because I prefer to start my browser with a blank home page and the phishing filter’s opinion of Internet Explorer’s ‘About:blank’ page makes an unwelcoming start to the day:

That is just annoying! The only solution I’d found was to disable the Phishing Filter in the settings, but running with it disabled has the drawback that Norton shows the alert icon
in the system tray and the big scary alert shown at left in the progam’s control panel.
Also I occasionally need to switch off parts of the program in the course of my work, and I do rely on the alert in the system tray to remind me to switch it back on again when I’m finished. But running without the entire package enabled means that this is always showing red and hence I’ve caught myself out a few times now without antivirus running.
Luckily it is possible to have the phishing filter enabled but hide the Norton toolbar showing in Internet Exporer 7. Here’s how:
Click the
Tools button, then select ‘Toolbars’ and check ‘Show Norton Toolbar’.

This lets you get rid of the phishing filter from the top of the page as well as showing the green Norton Protection Center icon
in the system tray.
internet explorer 7 | browser | Norton Internet Security | antivirus
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