I've been a Norton customer since 2000 and I have to say I'm very disappointed with the 2013 product. I know one angry subscriber doesn't mean much but voicing my frustration beats punching my monitor.
OS: XP SP3
CPU: Intel Pentium IV - Hyperthreading
RAM: 4 GB
Since installing NIS 2013 I've had it lock up and crash on me at least once every day. The most frustrating thing is it requires a reboot to restart which means I have to stop any downloads or online videos that are in progress.
Every time the lockup / crash happens it has been when I click on "Settings" on the top of the main window. Nothing happens on first click, NIS just sits idle. Eventually the window will stop responding and when I click the "close" button, the icon in the system tray will disappear as well as the child "ccsvchst.exe" process (the parent "ccsvchst.exe" remains).
If at this point I try to restart NIS by using the shortcut in my start menu, all I get is a "uistub.exe" but no window. Approximately 5 minutes later a notice will appear that NIS has crashed and it attempts to auto-fix itself. This fails which leads me to the support website, suggesting that I download and run Norton Power Eraser.
As a developer myself I almost feel like I'm running beta software, not a release candidate. It's very frustrating after paying a premium, to have software that locks up when simply trying to display a settings window.
Note:
I have done a full system scan and an NPE scan and the only thing found was NPE identified 3 false positives. I know they're false positives because two of them are programs I wrote and the third is the GUI for Visual Studio 6 (msdev.exe) which I've been using for years (really, if it's bad shouldn't NIS 2005, 2010, 2011 or 2012 found it? Maybe NIS is ineffective?)