Something happened to me last night that gave me an idea about some of the failed installations hereabouts.
I was launching an installation of some product unrelated to Norton. I double-clicked on the product. Nothing happened. Like a fool, I double-clicked again (believe, by this time I know better).
The product began self-installing. This began with unwrapping itself, which it did, then it began to install, but suddenly I got a message I haven't seen in years: Not enough space on the C-drive. I tried moving it to a different partition and got the same message, still referring to the C-drive. In other words, this was trying to install to the C-drive, whether or not I wanted it to. Or so I thought.
I cancelled the installation, trying redownloading the installer.
I won't waste a lot of pixels here. I wasted a lot of time trying things that didn't work before my brain finally kicked in.
Here is what happened, and it could be happening with NIS 2009 and other of its products:
I started two installations because I double-clicked twice. This product didn't check to see if any other installations were occurring, not even of itself.
The first installation unwrapped the installation package and began installing. Part of that process (which I know as a programmer) means creating temporary files that are used as markers and transfers of components.
The second installation collided with the markers and transfers of the first installation. Usually that result in a message that this product was being installed already or that it was already installed. Neither thing happened. Instead, because a file it needed to write in a certain location couldn't be written because the same file was already sitting there, it generated an error message: No room on drive C. Yes, it is poor programming, but it's a cheap product.
Well, when I cancelled the installation, it left those files are artifacts (turned out there were two of them), so each subsequent installation ran right into the artifact and produced the same results.
So, I did a search of my C-drive using the "files modified between 11/5/2008 and 11//2008" to find everything that had been created on my computer today. Then I sorted that by time and found the files created in the right time frame. There were two of these, both easily identified with the installation package. I deleted those, tried installing again and everything went without a hitch.
And all this finally brings me to Norton.
The two places where an inappropriate click might do abundant damage is
1. right at the start where someone clicks to launch the installer, sees nothing happen, then clicks again;
2. right after reboot, when NIS is collecting all sorts of data to complete the installation, the client might become impatient and start clicking buttons then.
At either point, the situation could be dire, running two installations in tamden or launching one part of a process when the installation itself is in its second main stage (say NIS 2008 has just been installed and the installer is now cleaning up and getting ready to actually put NIS 2009 in place).
If this is a possible scenario, then I have a suggestion for Symantec, paste a message on the screen before any unwrapping or any other computer process is taking place:
NORTON is not working, please do not try to laucn any programs or shut down until you are notified that this is okay. Interfering with this may prevent the installation from completing correctly.
This message should also be the first thing on the screen after a reboot.