NIS icon not appearing in system tray for a long time

Since updating to NIS 2013 (auto update from NIS 2012), I've noticed that the NIS icon takes a lot longer to appear in the system tray (bottom right hand corner of screen) than when I was running NIS 2012.  It now takes over 90 seconds to appear (from the moment the Windows 7 welcome screen shows).  This is on a 3.4GHz machine with an Intel i7 hyperthreading processor and 8GB memory!

 

Does anyone else have this problem?  More importantly, is NIS actively protecting my machine regardless of whether or not the icon is in the system tray (if not, that is a huge issue - a lot of damage can be done by malware in 90 seconds!).

 

Finally, I got an error message (3048,3) soon after NIS 2013 had installed and rebooted.  I ignored it and rebooted again and it hasn't shown up again so far.  This message seems to be a common issue with other people too - is there something about NIS 2013 that causes this - what exactly does 3048,3 actually mean?

 

Sorry for so many questions, but if there is a known issue with NIOS 2013, can anyone tell me how to revert to NIS 2012 please?

 

Many thanks.