I am a technician and am working on a customers PC. They have brought their PC to me due to several different issues, one of which is a severe lack of free space.
After looking around I have found that their free space issue appears to be caused by Norton 360.
They have a 40GB HDD, and there is one folder that appears to be used by Norton, that contains nearly 20GB of what appears to be junk.
However I cannot find anything within the program to determine if this folder is, in fact, used by Norton. Nor can I find a way to emptying it if it is used by Norton.
I see no reason why any program should need to use around 50% of the total capacity of a HDD.
Any help would be appreciated in resolving this matter.
This is the location of the folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Norton
I am a technician and am working on a customers PC. They have brought their PC to me due to several different issues, one of which is a severe lack of free space.
After looking around I have found that their free space issue appears to be caused by Norton 360.
They have a 40GB HDD, and there is one folder that appears to be used by Norton, that contains nearly 20GB of what appears to be junk.
However I cannot find anything within the program to determine if this folder is, in fact, used by Norton. Nor can I find a way to emptying it if it is used by Norton.
I see no reason why any program should need to use around 50% of the total capacity of a HDD.
Any help would be appreciated in resolving this matter.
This is the location of the folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Norton
Please give Scott a little more time to reply -- staff (names in red) are often on different time zones and also many help here in their after work time!
Sounds like the updates are failing and not cleaning themselves up properly. I'll wait for some confirmation from our team and let you know as soon as I hear.
That was yesterday.
When the fault is fixed I will post here with the solution.
After a bit of research I have learned the following:
The folder labeled NUC from the OP is part of the Norton Update Center. The temporary files (.tmp) which are being created are part of a newer process called Fail Safe Delivery which was introduced with this year's product line. In this case these files are not needed (except during the actual update process) and so they are safe to delete if they have not been cleaned up properly.
ItchyFlea, I will reach out to you with more details separately via email.
Deleting the files and disabling the Norton Update Assistant via registry key removal has not solved the problem. The files literally come back. They come back at approximately one 70MB file every 4 seconds.
Less than 30 minutes after deleting the files and stopping the updater, the folder had grown to 12.7GB in size.
Let us know the current version of Norton 360 you have, you can find it from Help & Support > About. Try to run LiveUpdate multiple times(2-3 times) to make sure that you receive all the available updates. If the problem persists, you may need to try Norton Removal Tool, and then reinstall Norton 360.
I'm not entirely sure I believe what I have just seen.
Upon customers instructions, I removed Norton, as they do not wish to continue having a product with this kind of negative impact on their system and the system performance.
So I first went through add and remove programs to remove it, and then after that, restarted the system and used the Norton Removal Tool. I restarted the system again.
A few hours later I had a hunch that I should check the folder where the junk files were, which according to the emails I received is the folder where Norton stores update files.
Norton was removed at approx 1:30pm today. The most recent file in that folder, is from 3:49pm!
Why on earth does Norton continue to wreck havoc on my customers computer? Why has the Removal Tool not removed the entire program? At what point will Norton cease to cause troubles for my customer and their computer?
And finally, there was a problem with my customers USB ports, in which a USB device would work for about a minute before having to be disconnected and reconnected. That problem has now gone completely with the removal or Norton 360.
Answers to these questions would be appreciated ASAP, as the customers machine is going to be returned to them in less than 48 hours time fixed or unfixed, as per the customers instructions.
Check Add/Remove Programs for any residual Norton applications. Some of the older products had things like Norton LiveUpdate Notice that installed as standalone applications. I would think the NRT would have gotten everything, but you never know.
Checked the BITSAdmin tool per advice received in email. Apparently there were 263 jobs in it all started by Norton 360.
I would have thought the Norton Removal Tool would have cancelled these, or at least the uninstaller from Add/Remove programs. They however have since been cancelled by me.
Add/Remove tools shows Norton Security Scan. That has been uninstalled now.
However none of this explains why the USB ports now work 100% after the removal or Norton 360.
Why did Norton 360 interfere and cause issues with the USB ports?
To spare you any more surprises, be advised that Norton Security Scan can sometimes reinstall itself automatically. If this happens here is the procedure to follow to remove it completely: