Live Updates Repeatedly Download and Fail to Install

Product: NIS 2014 installed in Oct 2013

 

OS: WinXP SP3

 

Problem Symptoms:

 

The problem described below appears to have begun around New Years Day 2014 on one of our home PCs.

 

The Norton system tray icon status indicator shows red exclamation (unhappy) status instead of the usual green check (happy)  status.

 

The NIS Panel Home tab status shows no successful Live Updates for the last 4 days.


Repeated attempts at manually initiated Live Updates were all unsuccessful, and show unexpected behavior including:

1) an unexpectedly large update filesize (total size 156.61 MB) instead of the usual smaller filesize updates.

2) attemped live updates include 4 Norton components, updated definitions, plus 3 others.

3) Live Update panel status shows the 156 MB download of 4 components to be successful, but the attempted install phase of the update fails for 3 or 4 components.

 

A quick search of the Norton Community Forums for Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus shows that several other posters have recently encountered similar behavior issues for NIS and/or NAV in the Nov 2013 thru Jan 2014 timeframe.

 

The Good News:
A solution was found. I will describe the details of the steps for the solution in a second post below.