Norton 360 stopped working

The Norton icon vanished from the toolbar.
The Norton entries on the of Windows explorer.right-click menu vanished.
When I tried to run Norton 360 or liveupdate; or quickscan nothing happened.
Windows task Manager shows that N360.exe is running.

I tried Live Chat twice; each time the Norton technician tried to remove my existing instalation and reinstall, but it did not work. When the machine rebooted it got stuck the the message from Windows telling me not to switch off the machine as the system updated. Even if it was left for 30 minutes, it did not go past this. When I powered down and switched the machine back on, the instalation program relaunches, but gets stuck.

I tried reinstalling the software myself, but it did not work any better.