Having this same problem despite recent Symantec assisted wipe and reinstall of v2. ANY change from "automatic" to "manual" and back again apparently disables the ability of N360 to monitor the "user input idle status" (as shown by the N360 widget). Once you make a change it's now unable to correctly note whether the system is idle or not.
The N360 widget on my Vista system initially read the 20 minute idle time countdown timer (20 minutes) and was correctly seeing ANY mouse input as a signal to reset the idle time counter. It is now inactive and any changes to task scheduling changes are not able to fix it. The countdown timer now shows no monitoring or counting at all.
Try to set all scans to manually, run liveupdate till it says there are no more updates. Then reboot your pc again, leave your pc on for one night...Should work after all updates at least till now it works for me and I had major troubles like most people.
At the request of Symantec and Leon2u, I've left my machine to finish whatever internal stuff it was attempting to do. Symantec thought that perhaps I had interrupted a scan and the PC was merely trying to finish something it had started earlier. I haven't made any changes to my settings and they are still set to manual. No changes have been made to my software since the last online chat attempt to resolve this last week. Live Update does occur every day (even though settings are at manual)
However, unwanted and intrusive scans continue to occur. Three scans happened yesterday (Wednesday) at 5am, 1pm and 8pm. I had to reboot my machine today in order to be able to use it as yet another intrusive scan was occurring.
By intrusive, I mean that this is not happening in the background as my hard drive is clearly being scanned by the antivirus software while I'm trying to use my machine. But as I have my settings at "Manual" nothing should be running in the background or otherwise until I tell it to. On my previous version of Symantec virus protection program, I had the option of telling the software when I wanted the scan to occur, if at all. I had no problems until upgrading to this version.
I'm sure that Symantec will continue to engage to resolve this as it does not seem to be an isolated problem.
Thanks to everyone who reported the follow-up problems with this issue. Our team has identified the problem, and is working to get it resolved and released soon. I will keep you posted on the fix, thanks again for your help!
I have no help to give, but would like to add my voice of disappointment at this problem. It is causing my system to become unusable as well. The online email/chat help has been next to useless as I am constantly told to run live update (which reports no updates) and to reinstall (now on my 3rd reinstall).
I hope an actual fix for this is available soon. I wish I'd bought NIS2008 instead. I enquired about having my online purchase changed, but to no avail.
Well I fair deal would be if they would let download you for free Norton Internet Security 2008 because the Norton 360 is a product which does not demand what you bought it for. So Symantec has not given you a product what tthe product promise you to so they should be offering you an alternative if you are not pleased with it. That is written by law, at least here in Holland it is.
The consumer law here (New Zealand) is similar, but getting a faceless offshore crowd to engage with you is not easy. My attempts to get support (before discovering these forums) was limited to being told "we understand" and other platitudes by someone in India, then being told to run live update and reinstall. They conveniently ignore any requests for allowing a change to the more configurable NIS2008 or refund.
Still...I have my fingers crossed a fix is in the works. I wonder if Symantec will consider buying me a new hard drive. I'm sure this one is about to explode with all the churning it's been doing.
Ok, there was one thing fixed in the previous update! If you turn off automatic scans and set everyting to manual scanning in the task scheduler then you are rid off the annoying scans. I had switched off all automatic scans and no trouble the last week. Two days back I put automatic on so that Norton 360 could decide when to do background scanning. Well and there we go again, scans drop in most annoying times.
So I guess before the new fix is there, switch off all automatic scans in the task scheduler...
And if you try to set it to weekly for e.g. friday eve or morning and then in the other tab set for e.g. only check browser. Do a reboot of your computer after you change settings to manual or weekly this to be sure that the scheduler services and software is reset for sure.
And it's the same today. It took over 30 minutes to even restart the PC, and then the scan continued unabated even after the restart.
I've used Symantec/Norton products since 1995. So after 13 years, Symantec have decided the best way to thank me for all the money I've given them is to ignore me. No replies to support emails, and there's a deafening silence from Symantec staff on this forum as well.
Thanks to everyone who reported the follow-up problems with this issue. Our team has identified the problem, and is working to get it resolved and released soon. I will keep you posted on the fix, thanks again for your help!
Tony Weiss Norton Forums Administrator Symantec Corporation
I can understand your frustration but give them time since this was a situation where a problem was identified, a fix issues and then it turned out that there was still a further problem in the same area.
Frankly, I don't know where I would go to get open support like this with such rapid reactions -- good luck but personally I'm staying around a product range I've used since Al Gore invented the Internet.
I had seen that. Sorry for venting the frustration. It was complicated by the poor email support I had been getting. Email replies ignored, or just replied to with the same silly instructions such as "try reinstalling the product" -- like I hadn't thought of that! (I made it clear I knew what I was doing and didn't need technophobe help.)
In the meantime, I have managed to get someone to help though and I have swapped from 360 to NIS2008. And it's working perfectly! Much more configurable. Of course, I am glad to be rid of 360!
I think they should make it clear that Norton 360 is aimed at the "install and forget" kind of market as there are not a lot of options you can change. Of course, these problems won't be easy for these types of users to handle though.
In any case, I hope the 360 problems can be sorted for those of you still persevering!
I'm like you...I've used Norton since my first internet experience (SLIP or PPP connection...which one to choose!). NIS2008 looks like the one for me. Considering I was happy with NIS2006, I should have known better! ha ha
I apologize for your frustrations with this issue. Our team is working hard to resolve the issue; I will let you know when an update is available. Thank you for your patience.
We installed 360 on all of our office computers about a month ago. Unfortunately nobody even thought to check that there was a way to set the virus scan to occur at specific times. There should be a BIG warning on the 360 page about choosing a different version if you need to configure the software.
The last month has been a nightmare of hard drives constantly running with no way to stop them. We set the scheduler to run full scans (we thought) on all the machines at 2 am not realizing that the scheduler doesn't affect the virus scan. We've had to reboot the machines a couple times a day to stop 360 and get the computers usable again.
I've spent a good chunk of a day trying to figure this out and finally ran across this thread. The big AHA, setting the schedule to manual doesn't change a thing, 360 will decide when to scan anyway! We'd like auto-protect on all the time, but only run tasks when we say OK.
This is disappointing and is a deal breaker for us, already the staff time has cost more than the product. Waiting for a fix is not an options since every time the computers go into 360 hard drive mania it basically shuts down our office.
I'm not looking for a response, we have to switch now, just wanted to put my 2 cents in since I've always liked Norton.
