Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[rgwright]

As I have seen many others complain about, I have problems with ccSvcHst doing huge amounts of I/O.   I've read most of the posts and it seems like many have this problem only after startup or whatever.   It happens on my machine all the time!   And when it does, it last anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes, occasionally even longer, and it literally locks my machine up completely.   Nothing else can run.   I can't even get Task Manager to open.   The hard drive is just pounding away.   I don't see that much high CPU usage, just disk usage.   I'm not sure why this occurs so often or how to mitigate it.   Any suggestions?

I'm running XP and NIS 2012 19.1.1.3 (just upgraded a couple of days ago, but this has been going on for as long as I can remember, even with prior versions of NIS), 2 GB RAM.   Not sure what else you;d want to know.

[lmacri Super Phishing Phryer]

Hi rgwright:

Welcome to the Norton community.

Have you ever had any other security software installed on your PC like McAfee, AVG, etc.?  If these programs don't uninstall cleanly and leave behind residual files and registry files, this can cause all sorts of problems running NIS and other Norton products (see AppalledBC's thread here about problems caused by PCTools for one example).  Post back if this is the case and we can provide instructions for cleaning these residual files off your computer.

Some people have even reported that installing NIS 2012 over a previous NIS version caused ccSvcHst.exe to run continously in the background, and the only solution was a clean re-install using the Norton Removal Tool.  See BugOutMachine's thread here titled Optimization Function Will Not Stop Running for instructions on performing a clean re-install of NIS.

If a clean re-install of NIS doesn't solve the problem, it's also possible that all the background idletime tasks that run in NIS (see a list at Performance | Norton Tasks) like the Idle Full System Scans are consuming a large portion of your 2 GB of RAM and causing your system to slow down or freeze.  Please see my post here in Patrick McCabe's thread here titled Is Norton Slowing Down My Computer? for some troubleshooting tips on diagnosing the exact cause of the problem and disabling or re-configuring these background tasks.  Since you used to have these problems with prior version of NIS this is likely at least part of the problem.

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Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 v. 18.6.0.29 * IE 9.0 * Firefox 8.0.0
HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS