Hello Norton Community!
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Preface:
Similar problem was reported by johnC123 here: (visit that to get more idea of what I’m going to explain):
http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Internet-Security-Norton/NAV-didn-t-start-and-it-didn-t-tell-me/m-p/1128852#M258101
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The difference is I am using NIS 21.2.0.38 and I could observe and log my system using various tools like Windows event viewer, Sysinternal’s proccess explorer and process monitor tools (lopped dlls, handles, etc), Windows error reporting system, Symantec’s tool SymNRA.
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Ok that said, it totals around 650Mb of log and screen shots and dumps.
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Compressed to 20Mb and being uploaded to my NZ account soon.
( logs may be shared on request only, as it may contain PII )
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Specs: Samsung NP550P5C-S02IN (3rd gen i7/8gb/1tb)
Softwares: Windows 7 fully patched and uptodate. All Samsung softwares & drivers, NIS, NZ, Symantec VIP, MBAM free, EMET 4.1 up 1, FF, Google Chrome, IE11 (all uptodate).
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Now the big (or ignorable :o 
) problem:
Yesterday, while I was in the middle of some work (Oh! That was I using ebooks in Adobe Reader), I just noticed NIS tray notification icon (actually it was a cold boot after LU)(the green tick of peace of mind [ not 1, two of them were there, the cosmo err, just double peace of mind 
]) went missing.
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Since I was aware of the issue, early notified by JohnC123, I tried to do what he did, ie to double-click on NIS Desktop icon. Nothing happened.
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So I went to program files, where nis.exe was traced from Desktop shortcut, executed it, used command line to bring up NIS, but all my attempts to bring up NIS GUI failed:(.
Then I tried to use the right click context menu to scan a random file. Oops! Failed again :(.
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So inorder to figure out what happened to NIS, I opened up event viewer, found 3 entries related to NIS.
One was faulting application error, next after it was event ids 34 and 35.
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To my curiosity I opened the task manager and checked ‘show process from all users’.
Ah! There I found not two but 3 nis.exe*32 processes.
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Action center reported NOTHING!, Windows firewall said it was managed by Norton.
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Then I started collecting logs, verified that 3 nis processes were running (1 under SYSTEM & 2 under my user name) , restart was done by SymNRA during logging. The dual icon came up. Restarted again as per request from SymNRA.
Now problem solved!
(couldnt reproduce it again (i dont want to), but was lucky to have some popular logging tools handy.
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(dont ask me to use NRNR, because i dont want to and hopes it will not occur again)
I think this to be taken seriously.