Drastic changes in scan time, other uncomfortable oddities...

Hi everyone. I'm currently running OS X 10.4.11 on a G5 iMac, which is also running Norton Antivirus 10.1.2. Lately I've seen some very peculiar issues that make me wonder if something more serious isn't wrong with my system. A few days ago, Liveupdate was consistantly failing to update the virus definitions. A reboot solved this, but it was still unsettling. A look in the console showed that a number of Norton errors were there, mostly "__CGPixelAccessLockWindowAccess" and "NortonAutoProtect crashed". I saw actual errors for none of these - only by looking into the console logs could I see them. No notifications otherwise. Well, the biggest oddity popped up when my weekly full system scan ran. Usually this scan takes a full four hours to complete. It has taken that long for months, if not years! But this week it finished in four minutes. I doubt that the entire system is being scanned in such a short time, and I wonder if a virus is causing Norton to ignore a lot of the system so that it can cause havoc!! Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks!