Continuous hard drive activity

Ever since I renewed my account last week, I have been plagued by a continuous HDD activity - and I mean for hours with the HDD light on solid.  This drags the rest of the computer down to a crawl.  I checked the Resource Monitor under Task Manager and the culprit seems to be Norton 360 which shows over 5,000,000 B/sec writes on the C drive - the Norton360.exe is right at the top of the list of processes accessing the HDD. Attempting to close the process results in a "Access Denied" error.  I have tried everything from disabling "Backup" to making sure no scans are running - a slow process because with the continuous HDD activity, every Norton process takes huge amounts of time to get up and running. Earlier today, I got involved in a chat with Norton support where I gave the tech permission to access my computer but he was unable to resolve the issue.  Next step is uninstalling the Norton and going with something else unless I can come up with a solution to this.  I'm afraid that with the non-stop HDD thrashing that my HDD may be physically damaged.  Any suggestions will be welcome