Norton 360 Thrashing My Hard Drive

I've had Norton 360 installed on my Windows 7 Ultimate Dell workstation for several years now and have always been pleased with it.

Lately however it has taken to constantly thrashing my hard drive with read/writes and I'm worried that my hard drive will simply fail soon if I can't stop it.  I have verified in Task Manager that it is definitely n360.exe that is constantly reading and writing millions of bits of data although I have no idea what their purpose is.

I have googled this issue and found quite a few accounts in various forums of people who have suffered from this problem but so far nobody seems to have come up with a workable solution other than to dump Norton which I am reluctant to do, having just renewed for a further year.

In the last couple of days I have carried out two re-installs, the first from the installation files already on my disc, the second from the original software CD, and I used the Norton Removal Tool and Norton Power Eraser before each one.  Still the problem comes back!   I am at my wits end.

Dave.