I made this discovery when finally resolving some performance issues I've had with NIS for the past 18 months, as per my forum thread I started last April (https://community.norton.com/en/forums/progressive-slowing-nis-gui-launch)
I eventually traced the cause of my problems to the progressive growth of the file C:\ProgramData\Norton\{0C55C096-0F1D-4F28-AAA2-85EF591126E7}\NIS_22.5.4.24\diStRptr\diStRptr.dat. A search of the community forum found numerous threads describing all kinds of issues relating to that file - the most common being lengthy bursts of very high disk write I/O, often rendering the PC unusable. Further investigation revealed that the file is associated with Norton Community Watch and it seems that NCW submissions are saved to that file if the relevant server cannot be contacted.
Further reading of the various threads suggested that NCW attempts to contact the stats.qalabs.symantec.com server and, if unsuccessful, should then try stats.norton.com instead. Other suggestions were that the symantec server is used for product testing and the norton server for live released versions. (It certainly is the case that the symantec server is not listed on public DNS servers as attempts to ping it always fail.) However, that automatic fail-over to the norton server doesn't seem to work correctly, leaving NCW unable contact either server resulting in the progressive build up of the diStRptr.dat file, causing various performance issues with the NIS product.
One forum member reported that, as he connects via a proxy server, he was able to set up the proxy server to map stats.qalabs.symantec.com to the same IP address as stats.norton.com and that resolved the issue for him. I tried effectively the same thing by pinging stats.norton.com to obtain its IP address and then mapped that address to stats.qalabs.symantec.com with an entry in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. NCW was then able to contact the server and my diStRptr file progressively shrank back from 5.6Mb (which it grown to in only ten days since my last NIS reinstall) to just 34KB. All my performance issues were then solved.
The approach of trying to contact one server and then failing over to another server seems a crazy way of implementing the NCW submissions. If it is true that stats.qalabs.symantec.com is only reachable in the test environment, then the fail-over to stats.norton.com is never going to be tested because the symantec server will always be available in test. Surely it would be better to have the NCW code pick up the server URL from a parameter file and have test and live versions of that file. Alternatively, always use the same URL but have different DNS settings in the test environment to those circulated in the public domain.
The frustrating thing is that some of the forum threads I found have suggestions that this problem has been known about for 2 - 3 years but no fixes have been issued. Come on, Symantec, we do pay for support with our annual subscriptions - how about providing some, rather than just the "uninstall and reinstall" solution.
Meantime, I'll carry on with my fix, remembering to ping the server from time to time to check that the IP address hasn't changed.