I had two unrelated problems. Here is how I solved both of them for Ghost 15 SP1 under Windows 7 32 bit (I'm guessing the same process for Vista, and a similar one for XP):
--I want Norton Ghost to send me e-mail notifications. You'll find instruections elsewhere for editing c:\Program Data\Symantec\Norton Ghost\Norton Ghost.notify.xml if you need to update the SMTP port to 587 (or whatever). Here is my edited line:
<ServerPort vt="23">587</ServerPort>
Anyway, that worked fine for a year or more. Then, one day, I stopped getting e-mails. Upon further investigation, I found that all of my customizations had been removed from the .xml file. And, no matter how many times I re-entered them through the options console, they weren't re-saved in the .xml file.
I killed three Symantec processes related to Northon Ghost using Microsoft's Process Explorer, and restored a backup copy of the .xml file. Rebooted and everything was fine for a while. Then it happened again -- no idea why. No problem this time, since I kept a backup copy of the .xml file w/ the real file. Killed the processes, copied the backup over, rebooted and all is fine. For now.
--Then, I began having an issue where my backups would complete, but the console would hang saying that "1 second remaining" and the status read either "Creating recovery point" or "Updating history." I concluded that my history was whacked.
I killed the processes, deleted some old recovery points, and then deleted (moved, actually, to a subdirectory whose name reflected my annoyance and can't be posted here) the contents of c:\Program Data\Symantec\Norton Ghost\History -- leaving the the History subdir empty. Rebooted, and ran my missed backups. All appears well.
I did not actually go back and try and import the backups I saved, but I will. They don't exist as far as Ghost is concerned, since I deleted the history files.
Very annoying.