I just restored a Ghost image from a year ago, and Norton, instead of updating, told me that my subscription had expired, so I used the removal tool to get rid of all Norton things, then reinstalled from a saved NIS installer file. Upon reinstalling, WinPatrol warned me that "a new Window Services has been installed. Remote Procedure Call (RPC) LD, at C:\ProgramData\Rpcnet\Bin\rpcld.exe", and I would normally assume, from the coincidence in time, that it was from Norton. However, since Norton was off for a few moments, I am paranoid about the admittedly remote possibility that the RPC installation may have been something else. I want to make sure that rpcld.exe was part of NIS.
The reason for my paranoia is that, and is also the reason for restoring from an image, for the second time in 6 months, and this has never happened to me before since my first Norton in 2001, my computer started acting slow and I noticed that the Norton icon was missing from systray. Naturally, knowing that Vista sometimes loses such icons, like the network connection icon, I tried to open the program from elsewhere--but it would not open. Suddenly, a Norton window popped up and told me that Norton had encountered an "internal error"--which I interpreted as a euphemism for something malicious having gotten in and turned NIS off--and, after about an hour or so of hassle, including running NPE, it fixed the issue. When it happened before, the internal error window never came up, and I contacted support chat, which took me through the same process that the automatic fix did this time.
I should mention that, in addition to NIS, I run MAB regularly, as well as SuperAntiSpyware, and even PCMatic and, lately, Reimage, so I have multiply redundant checks on the presence of malware, and none of them have found anything but tracking cookies, except that Norton did decide that my saved version of autochk.exe that Microsoft had sent me last year to fix a corrupted file was a Trojan, which it quarantined. And PowerEraser did, this time but not the first, find one file that it thought was malicious, but when I looked in the folder where the file was supposed to be, while it was waiting for me to tell it to fix it or not, no such file was there, and I have folder settings set to show hidden files and folders.