I have Norton 360 installed and I've recently noticed that Norton will start running some background task and just suck up the available memory and max out the hard drive. When it does this, I cannot do anything on my PC as it's become a resource hog. I though that if you were working on the PC, Norton would just stay idle and do nothing until there was a noticeable time period that it could resume whatever it's doing but not now. I was totally locked out of my PC today and other days because Norton just keeps running. Has something changed? Do I have a corrupt copy or a bad setting?. I'm concerned as need access to my PC. Please let me know what is happening.
What can happen is if you have not allowed your system to go into idle enough for Norton to be able to finish all its background tasks, eventually it will run the tasks regardless of whether the system is idle or not. Once it catches up it goes back to normal.
One thing you can check is that you set the idle time out to 1 minute. That will trigger the background tasks more often and should stop what is happening with the high resource use.