I'm using NIS 2011 (fully up to date) with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, SP1. Today my computer suddenly started making an unusually loud noise, with the hard drive indicator light showing a lot of activity, even though I had no programs running at the time. Checking in the Task Manager, I discovered that the process ccSvcHst.exe, user System, (Symantec Service Framework) was using around 50% of the CPU. This lasted about 15 minutes before eventually stopping.
There was no pop-up message indicating that Norton was performing background tasks, and the activity didn't stop when I moved the mouse to make sure the computer wasn't in an idle state.
I tried opening NIS to see what it might be doing, and it was extremely slow to open and switch views etc. The performance graph was showing that Norton was using a lot of CPU, but I couldn't work out exactly what it was doing. When CPU usage dropped back to normal, I checked the NIS History, but nothing was showing there for the time this had been going on, and there are no errors showing in the Windows event log.
Even after the CPU had returned to normal, after I had checked in Norton and closed its window, segments of the window stayed behind hiding the desktop, and I had to refresh the desktop view to get rid of them. I don't know if this is related or not, but I don't remember this happening before.
I've seen there are a lot of posts here about ccSvcHst.exe, but all the others seem to be talking about the high CPU usage going on for longer, or the computer freezing or hanging. That wasn't happening for me, but I'd still like to know what was going on, and how it might be prevented. The noise the computer was making while this was happening did not sound terribly healthy for the computer.