Anti-Virus company Symantec may compensate Chinese computer users whose  systems were crippled by an antivirus update last week.

Last Friday Symantec delivered a flawed virus-signature update to customers. The update mistook two critical system files of the Simplified Chinese edition of Windows XP Service Pack 2 as a Trojan horse. This quarantined netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll which caused Windows to fail. An update was released on the same day but the fix was too late for any PC that had been rebooted in the intervening 13-plus hours.

Users had to copy the two.dll files restored to the hard drive's "windowssystem32" directory to restart.

Chinese television slammed Symantec for producing a work around for the problem which was too complicated for average users to do.