I booted up my laptop and let it idle for about 45 minutes to allow Norton to do it's stuff. When I came back to it, the drive was still thrashing, but I wanted to use my machine so I tried to load my web browser. That took forever because of all the drive thrashing. I noticed that CCSvcHst.exe was using about 25 to 30 percent of the CPU so I loaded procmon.exe to see what it was doing since the Norton Tasks page said NIS 2011 wasn't doing anything.
It was constant reading and writing to two files: mrclean.db and performance.db. The later more than the former, but when doing both it basically made my system unusable because of all the disk activity. About an hour later it stopped, but what exactly was it doing?
The files listed are Norton database files. Have you recently defragmented your hard drive? This may be related to your post about Apoint.exe; I will ask a specialist about this.
I agree with you 100%. I didn't really have a problem with the high disk access on my desktop PC because it has enough memory to handle it. But I recently purchased a used laptop and every time I start it, about five to ten minutes into the session, ccscvhst.exe highjacks the machine and appears to be doing a harddisk scan which completely prevents me from doing anything else. This last 45-60 minutes and is totally frustrating. I am writing this note just after a reboot on my desktop PC and I'm watching the performance memory graph in the NIS program and it is running at about 80% usage and ccsvchst is using a lot of it or most of it depending on where I click on the graph. When I switch to CPU usage the graph shows ccsvchst using up to 88% of the CPU. I don't ever recall this being a problem in NIS 2010 or earlier but I may not have noticed because I didn't have the laptop. I have been a loyal Norton customer for as many years as I can remember, but this is a real gamechanger and if it continues, I am going to have to find a new program to use.
It's not really the memory usage I have a problem with since Norton isn't using much memory or much CPU really either. The disk access is what's killing me since Norton is doing a lot of random read/writes on the two database files:
MrClean.db is 46 MB in size which is probably what's causing the problem. I'll try defragging since I haven't done that for a while. Still if I'm using the machine I don't want Norton doing whatever background management it decides it needs to do. Let it do that when my machine is idle.