Norton 360 crashing at startup, no past solution seems to work

For a few months now, Norton 360 has been crashing at startup, but this wasn't much of a problem because a new process would open and N360 would recover. 

I found the cause of these crashes, Malwarebytes Anti-malware and I uninstalled it, removed all traces from the registry, and restarted.

So, according to 90% of all solutions, which are the ones that tell you to get rid of other AV software, Norton 360 should work perfectly. That was where 90% of solutions were wrong, it didn't.

The problem worsened even more, the time between a fresh new n360.exe process increased and sometimes required me to close ccsvchst.exe manually before it reopened all its processes. 

Eventually, it reached the point it has been on for the past 2 weeks, where it showed this exact behavior:

  • PC starts up, after 15 seconds (roughly) the first crash notification comes through
  • This is the first secondary process (as in the first duplicate process that appears alongside the original) crashing.
  • There are three more crashes, making 4 crash messages in total.
  • Each secondary process has around 35,000K of RAM (~35MB of RAM) and always have the exact same amount of ram usage. The crash notification from Windows appears within a second.
  • The original process never crashes, but it has strange RAM behavior:
    • It starts at around 14,000K RAM usage, then slowly rises to somewhere around 48,000K then instantly drops to about 6,000K then rises to 20,000K and back to 6,000K where it loops its increase from 6,000K - 20,000K indefinitely.

The first reinstall was done after I removed Malwarebytes and deleted the registry entries and deleting a strange phantom Norton Utilities 15 entries. I uninstalled, choosing to delete all data and then used the NRT tool. When I used the NRT tool I restarted, installed a new version of Norton 360 and this happened:

  • When the setup got to "Starting", I noticed that the exact same crash behavior began occurring again, even though I just deleted every last bit of all Norton products. 
  • Even though N360 never even opened, the installer went to activation, where it then vanished after it was done, making me assume that the next thing that should've happened was N360 opening up and giving me some sort of welcome message.

This installation completely messed up so the autofix program told me to use the reinstall tool, which did its thing and resulted in the exact same problem as the past 2 installs. So someone told me to do something in safe mode, so I managed to use a Full System Scan which isolates this problem to the main Norton 360 UI, specifically n360.exe and not the scanning modules. It appears that the distribution of whatever the current n360.exe is bugged out on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

I uninstalled all data (second option) and ran NRT, reinstalled for the third time and got the same problem. This time I still did the uninstall from the Control Panel, used NRT but this time I deleted all the empty Norton and Symantec entries in the registry. Reinstall #4... had the same problem as reinstall 1, 2, and 3. Hooray, more smashing my head on the desk. This time I took a new approach, using Power Eraser to find problems and it got me to restart then it did its magic, showing me some legitimate problems that looked really promising. When I hit fix, it ran for a bit and crashed. I took one last shot, running NRT twice in a row, removing all Norton/Symantec registry entries, removing all the folders and restarting, reinstalling and hoping that the fresh new installer from norton.com, where I got all my 5 copies of the same installer, would work after 10 hours of constant registry edits, restarts, scans, tool runs and looking for and finding solutions for similar but not the same problems. 

"Norton 360 has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Please close the program. [-> Close the program]"

But at least there was a breakthrough, the installer said it had no internet connection. If that change in the results occurred three installs ago, I would have been screaming with joy but now I've given up on finding solutions on my own. I really need some help that extends beyond "contacting chat/support" because if that really was the solution then at least somebody at Norton would've done something like post a tutorial on how to fix it or made a more accurate troubleshooting page for this specific problem.

PC Specifications

  • OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
  • CPU: Intel Core i7 2600
  • RAM: 8GB of DDR3
  • GPU: AMD Radeon R9 270X
    • Driver info: I'm using a beta driver, version 15.6, which may possibly be the source of the problem.
  • System drive: 1TB Samsung EVO 840 SSD