I'm curious if there is a general slowdown in Liveupdate for some reason this evening. I need to download a huge liveupdate (approx 200 MB), which would normally take me between 1-2 minutes, but at the current rate could take more than 30 minutes, even though Liveupdate has 4 simultaneous connections to akamai servers. It was so slow I phoned my ISP to ask if there was any slowdown in my system, which there wasn't. And I did a test download of a large NIS install file in 30 seconds or so. So it's something peculiar to Liveupdate, perhaps the servers at akamai, causing it to be slow. Maybe Norton is pushing out a lot of updates today, slowing the servers?
I just ran Live update - two updates totalling 3.91MB took well over 40 seconds to download, much slower than usual.
I had a similar experience last night but it was on my XP installation that I only open up rarely and I ran into the Subscription Expired experience due to a long period with no internet access -- I do wish they would not just make the bald statement but point you to a sensible solution ..... which in my case was to click on Support / Subscription Status which came back with 77 days left and let me run LiveUpdate ..... very slowly.
After a few attempts last night with Liveupdate downloading so slow, I decided to give up and do some other chores instead. When I returned to the computer about 3 hours later, the slowdown was over, and I could download the large update at a fast speed. So I guess it was just "one of those temporary things", that somehow got worked out.
Since the problem no longer exists, I'll mark this thread as "solved", even though the cause is unknown. Thanks to all who commented.