NIS 2009 16.7.2.10 Crashing, no icons but NO error messages either...

I've been having this problem for several days.  NIS seems to be working just fine and the all of the sudden the Norton icon disappears and I no longer have protection.  I uninstalled and reinstalled twice (once in safe mode) and it will work fine for a few hours then I get the same thing happening.  I DO NOT get any error messages whatsoever - NIS just seems to stop working for no apparent reason.  I can restart it thru services.msc but it will only work for a few minutes and then it crashes again.

 

When NIS is running everything seems just fine.  I can do scans, updates etc. 

 

I am running Windows XP and SP2.

 

Can anyone help?