Hi, I've not used a NIS product since 2005, but when my current firewall subscription expired I decided to give Norton another shot with 2009 after reading about all the improvements and it's new 'lighter' design. To start with it seemed to work very well, and everything was behaving fine and it did seem like a very nice product.
But after a week or so something happened, all of a sudden Vista would not load - the machine powered on and did the usual Vista loading screen, but when it gets to the point the Windows logo flashes on and you go to the User logon screen it is just black - not even a mouse pointer and the keyboard doesn't appear to respond either. I noticed it did seem to start lagging a bit bringing up the logon screen, but it would never hang at the black screen indefinitely.
I restarted in Safe Mode and it loaded fine, I tried various things just tinkering around with it - even doing a System Restore in case a Windows Update from the day before had caused it. But nothing would fix it. In the end a friend of mine suggested that, despite my renewed faith in Norton products, I should just try uninstalling it and rebooting. After exhausting all other avenues I decided it would do no harm to try. Much to my bewilderment it turns out that my friend may have been on to something - without Norton it worked perfectly!
So I reinstall it and carry on using the Windows fine (I didn't touch the settings and didn't do the update, unless it did it automatically without me knowing), I restart and the same problem came back - Vista hangs at a black screen. So I go back into Safe Mode and uninstall Norton again, and sure enough it fixes the problem.
After a few tries at this I go into the Norton Settings to see what I can tweak, and I decided to enable early protection as an experiment. Problem is Norton has now developed another fault - I can no longer Save or Apply and changes to the Settings menu, if I try and leave the menu it just stops responding with mouse showing it's 'Loading' icon, nothing can save it at this point and you can't even end the task or process (presumably that's a security feature rather than a fault). The only thing I can do is restart - but of course that only leads back to the Black Screen of Death! It does this no matter how many times I go into Safe Mode and uninstall it and go into it normally and install it the same problems come back.
I'm completely stumped by this - how on earth can I attempt to troubleshoot something that doesn't get far enough into booting to give you any sort of error message? Has anyone had a similar problem? Has anyone got any ideas of things I could try to fix it? Anyone know how it managed to work fine for the first week?
Where do I stand if this problem can't be fixed? Am I entitled to a full refund? My system meets the advertised minimum specs for running the program?
Edit: Just to add I've installed no new peripherals or programs on my system since installing NIS2009, the only possible changes would be from Windows Updates or Norton Updates...