Hello all,
I have been following this forum for quite some time as I have had problems with Norton once in a while that have been resolved by reading the posts here (the most recent one for me being the new version upgrade to 22.5.2.15 which resulted in a rather unpleasant morning spent cleaning up false-positives for hours). I have not really had reason to sign up to solve a problem until now, though. Now, I'm not entirely sure if this will be an ongoing issue for me, because it's only just recently occurred and it seems to have resolved itself (oddly enough), but I figured it was worth a shot explaining what I've experienced in the hopes that if it does occur again, I'll at least have you guys to help me out.
Okay, here goes: earlier tonight, I stepped out of my room for a few minutes and upon returning, I noticed a message on my computer from Norton that said that it was "performing background tasks" (or something along those lines). That's not the weird part, though (obviously), as it does that sort of thing all the time, so the message itself was not at all unusual to me. The really weird part was that as soon as I sat down and got back to work on my computer, I tried to open Norton so that I could take a look at the security history (which I do all the time) and the security center just... wouldn't load.
Let me clarify: the security center did eventually open, it just... took extremely long doing so (about a minute or two). But when I attempted to access the security history, it wouldn't load at all - the history screen just hung there until I was forced to close the window (which took another 2-3 minutes to actually, y'know, close). My internet was laggy as well.
At first I chalked the whole thing up to being a weird hiccup or something, so I just closed the security center (which again took a while to close), and gave it a minute before trying to reopen it.
However, when I double-clicked Norton, it took a while to open (again), and clicking on the security history resulted in the same thing as before. It was really weird. At that point, I figured that I'd try clicking on "get support" under the "help" tab in the security center to see if perhaps Norton auto-fix might locate a problem... but it hung there, too. I started to worry because I REALLY wasn't in the mood to spend the rest of my night in some endless uninstall/reinstall cycle... but suddenly the issue seemed resolved itself, and Norton was back to normal. Until the same laggy nonsense started up again a few minutes later, that is.
At my wit's end, I ran LiveUpdate, and it installed the latest patch. I figured that maybe an update was needed or something, so I tried opening Norton again to see if the problem was still there, and it was. Norton was STILL laggy, and absolutely nothing had changed. So I rebooted my computer, and miraculously - everything seems to be fine now (Internet's back to normal, too). I tried auto-fix again after the reboot, and everything checks out fine.
Any ideas what might have caused the problem? Because I simply do not understand how interrupting the "background tasks" that Norton was performing could have caused this lag issue that took two hours out of my night when this sort of thing has never happened to me before. I don't know, help me out here, guys - was it a random glitch? A hiccup? I mean, sometimes weird things happen with computers, and sometimes rebooting 'em fixes the problem, that's just part of life... but has anybody else experienced the same thing? As I write this, it's been two and a half hours or so after the initial problem, so is it possible that Norton was experiencing an issue at the time? I'm just trying to correlate the time frame with whatever else might have been happening at the same time. Like a server issue, or some other random thing? I had the same problem on my laptop, so perhaps it was a temporary Norton issue that was resolved on their end? Because the laptop's running fine now, too.
I've run the usual scans, and no malware's been detected, so I do not think it's THAT kind of issue. And besides, I don't make a habit of doing anything with my computer that could invite risks of any kind so I am fairly certain this isn't a malware issue. I've gone through the scenario again, and again in my head, and this only occurred when I got back to my routine on the computer AFTER Norton starting running background tasks, so that's why I've decided to isolate THAT as the hypothetical root of the problem, because as I've said - I've done nothing to invite infection, and I haven't made any recent changes to either computer.
Anyway, my desktop (the one I'm currently on) is running Windows 7, and the laptop is running Windows 8. I'm so sorry for going on so long, guys. I just wanted to give as much detail as possible. Haha, I think I may have overdone it ! :)
Anyway, you guys have been more helpful to me than you could ever have known at times, and I decided that it was better to bring this problem to you here on the forum, as my last experience with Norton's support was horrible: a few weeks back when the heuristics problem was running wild and quarantining files left and right, I tried explaining to at least three different support representatives that the latest version seemed to have caused the issue (I was looking through the forums at the time, so I knew I wasn't the only one experiencing the issue). They basically told me I that was imaging the whole thing, and that Norton "doesn't find false-positives, your computer is just infected, blah, blah..."
It was an absolutely terrible experience, and truly disheartening as I've used Norton for as long as I could remember. For them to flat-out lie to me and only admit the problem AFTER I provided at least six different links to the forums here basically confirming that EVERYBODY ELSE was having the same heuristics problem was the last straw.
Anyway, thanks guys!! And sorry for the length :)