Norton Antivirus Service Quality Rant

I have just experienced a series of events that is very frustrating.  Hopefully someone at Symantec/Norton can review this and improve the situation in the future.

 

I have a considerable number of viruses that were quarantined.  These are actual viruses, not false positives, that I actually want to keep (for study).  Before I copied these files to my computer, I forgot to exclude the scan directory from NAV.  So they were caught and put into quarantine.  So far, no complaint from me: a virus scanner doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and my own oversight in forgetting to tell NAV about what I'm doing.

 

Now is where it gets ugly.  I have literally 21 pages of files listed in my "Security History/Quarantine" view.  How can I quickly and easily restore all these to their original location?

 

The process is described here.  But it's a little unclear to me, as step 3 says, "This option returns the selected Quarantine item to its original location without repairing it" but then step 5 has me selecting a location where the file will be restored.  Which is it, restored to the original location, or do I have to pick a location?  Manually selecting the original location for the dozens of files is simply too time-consuming.

 

I tried to use the online chat feature for help starting at approximately 2:15 pm Central time, or about three hours ago.  How long am I supposed to wait?  Other online support chat websites I've used are able to provide at least a rough time estimate.

 

Next I went to the community forums to post my question there.  I found out that I have to register for the forums... but I'm already have a Norton account---the one that I created when I registered my product.  So now I have two logins registered with Norton/Symantec.  (As a technology person, I understand that "behind the scenes", you probably have different systems for product registration and community forums.  But from a user usability standpoint, why not put in a little extra effort to have a single sign on?)

 

So I registered for the forums and waited for my confirmation email... after waiting a while, I checked my spam folder.  I use Google mail (gmail) as my email provider, and I find it's spam detection to be fairly high quality: little spam gets through and virtually no false positives... but not this time!  If nothing else, I find it ironic that a Gmail flagged the email from a security company as spam.