Beginning yesterday, I began having lockups on two of my home computers, both of which have NIS installed. I was able to track the problem to the new NIS version 18.5.0.125. Both computers have Windows 7 Ultimate 64
My symptoms started showing with the following:
1. Could not shutdown the computer normally. It would freeze on the "Shutting Down..." screen with the spinning circle. I had to use the power button to force it down. This could reliably be repeated every time.
2. Random freezes when surfing the web. We could do things sometimes for a few hours without issue, then IE would freeze and be "Not Responding". Other times it happened within a few minutes.
3. NIS itself would freeze when trying to do a Virus Scan. Even a quick scan. Would freeze on the 'scanning commonly infected areas and start-up file' phase. Every time.
4. Disk defragmentation would freeze when trying to analyze the C-drive. I could analyze other drives (each machine has D,E,F,G,H drives as well as C, they are all just partitions in one drive). Since we are mentioning this, NIS is installed on the D: drive.
Some steps I took:
1. Uninstalled and used Norton Removal tool.
2. Now, with NIS gone, all of the ablove problems went away. No problems shutting down, defragging, surfing, etc.
3. Reinstalled 18.5.0.125 from a fresh download.
4. Now, with it reinstalled, all of the above problems came back. Exactly the same as before.
5. I Dsabled Auto-Protect for 5 hours and rebooted. With auto-protect disabled at start-up everything is fine. No issues. Can do scans, defrags.
6. I re-enabled, problems came back.
7. Also, if i started up the system with auto-protect enabled, and immediately disabled it, the problems persisted. So, simply diabling auto-protect did not make the problems go away, you had to start-up windows with it disabled for things to work.
8. Finallly, I found link to the prior version, 18.1.0.37. I uninstalled, and norton-removed 18.5.0.125. Rebooted. Installed 18.1.0.37. Immediately disabled Automatic updates to make sure 18.5 didn't come back. Everything is working fine again. I used intelligent updater to get latest virus definitions. With 18.1 there are no issues. Can defrag, scan, surf, etc. just like before.
Definitely something with 18.5. I am staying with 18.1 until this is resolved. That being said, is there a way to get the security updates in a download form like Intelligent updater? Or is there a way for me to stop Program updates from coming thru on Automatic Updates? I'd like to have the latest updates without risking 18.5 getting re-installed.