Norton 360 is slow to start up

Good afternoon.

To begin, I have looked through many Norton community posts and have found similar topics, but the threads are all locked to new comments.  So, I'm starting a new thread.  (Sorry)

My computer setup is:  

  • 4th gen i7 processor
  • 16G ram
  • 4TB hard drive
  • GeForce GTX 980 Ti video card
  • WiFi N
  • Bluetooth 4.0
  • Windows 8.1

And the rest of the system is pretty standard.

I fired up my system without Norton 360 and I clocked startup at just over 10 seconds from the time I pressed the power button to the point where I could start using programs.  Then I installed Norton 360 and then it took just over 1-1/2 minutes from the push of the power button to where I could use the system smoothly.

Here are the steps that I then performed.

  1. I uninstalled Norton 360 (using Norton's uninstall app) and the system went back to the first scenario of a 10 second startup.
  2. I re-installed Norton 360 and my system was slow to boot ... again.
  3. Then I formatted my hard drive and reinstalled basically Windows 8.1 and nothing more.  It was snappy.
  4. I installed Norton 360 and the startup bogged right down again.

So, I'm sure there are other diagnostics I could run, but in its simplest sense I have a high confidence level that Norton has something to do with this issue.

Also, I tried some of the ideas I saw in other posts, like set Norton to "normal" instead of "aggressive" or delay the start of Norton at startup, however I can't find where I can make those changes.

I'm hoping someone has suggestions on how I can improve the performance on my system?  I'm a staunch Norton supporter (have been for years), but I would prefer not to have my higher end system bogged down because of it.

Thanks!