It has been five weeks since I first created a Norton Family account and, as a very rough estimate, after working with about eight different Norton tech representatives and being pushed many times up the chain of expertise, I have yet to ever be able to use Norton Family at all.
First, I do appreciate that KatieQ's help with the first of my two seemingly related blocks/problems. Initially whenever I tried to login I received a message indicating that I should try later due to a "server error;" the supposedly temporary error lasted many days. A week after initially creating a Norton Family account, I was finally able to access that account after KatieQ referred the issue to Norton's "development team." I don't know what they did; but I was able to login without problem to the part where I can create and change settings.
Then came the next step of downloading the software to have this computer recognized. It was not recognized automatically with installation (as would usually occur), and when it offered a dialog box for me to login and "Add Computer" once again I was confronted with an error message about the server being unavailable. (Just to be clear, I was at that point and still am able to login without problem to the online settings page.) What followed over the next days and weeks was amounted in some sense to a tour of Norton's friendly chat support personnel; I may not have met all of them yet. (I had decided to try Chat support, but realize now that I would probably have been better off returning to this forum immediately.) I'm guessing I spent about 18+hours with one tech person or another both by Chat and by phone, usually with them working directly on my computer via remote connection. While the seeming head of services there, Glenn Bosshardt, is easy to work with and seems quite knowledgeable, the last decision was to refer the problem--the same single problem re login to add a "device," mind you--back to the Admin/Support behind this Forum.
So this is mainly a heads-up (as well as a curious suggestion if it makes sense to just start by referring the problem to the "development team"). Thanks for your attention. Glenn has any other releveant tech details.
p.s. Curiously my initial problem parraleled that of the previous Post-er, dbdan22.