After reading SwedGoforit's comments here in the thread NIS Performance uses 90-100% of my CPU, I decided it was time to jump on my soapbox and vent my frustration with the current level of technical support Symantec employees are providing in the forum.
My perception might be skewed, but a few years ago it seemed that a Symantec employee would often join a thread or request diagnostic logs via a private message if users posted about serious issues (e.g., handle leaks, high CPU or memory usage, BSODs caused by Symantec drivers, etc.) that couldn't be solved by a reinstall or wipe of some old security software. I also seem to recall that there used to be a list of known bugs pinned at the top of each board that users could check to see if Symantec was already aware of their issue. If Symantec stays with their current schedule of releasing a new software version every September, I'm concerned that most of the bugs in the current v. 21.x (2014) won't even be addressed until beta-testing for the upcoming v. 22.x (2015) software begins.
Symantec CEO Steve Bennett promised investors a cost reduction of "200 basis points of margin improvement" when he announced a corporate restructuring and layoff of 1,700 jobs in 2013 (see here for more info). I'm sure that's small comfort to SwedGoforit and all the other users who have decided to remove their Norton security software after experiencing the "free support 24/7" included with their annual subscription.
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MS Windows 32-bit Vista Home Premium SP2 * Firefox 27.0.1* IE 9.0 * NIS 2013 v. 20.4.0.40
HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS