Greeting to the forum.
I've recently installed my Norton Ghost 15 on my PC, after a clean install of Windows 7 [64-bit].
At some point after this installation, I started noticing that the floppy drive on my PC was being accessed quite regularly and w/o any real reason.
More particularly, I noticed that it was getting accessed when I was using the "Create a restore point" dialog box in Windows 7. As soon as I press the "Configure..." or the "Create..." buttons, the floppy drive is accessed unnecessarily. The same thing is happenning also when I am pressing the Escape button to cancel the previous operation...!
As I was gettting quite annoyed by this stupid behaviour, I opened the Task Manager in order to try and isolate a particular process that is running when this floppy access happens. So I did, and not before long, I spotted the culprit: SymSnapServicex64.exe. Did a check on this and it appears that it is one of the services of Norton Ghost, which is executed under the SYSTEM account (i.e. not possible to kill it... I tried and failed on this).
Not being able to kill this executable and see whether this would make any improvement, I decided to uninstall Norton Ghost completely. Did that till the end, rebooted the PC (now w/o the Norton Ghost 15) and alas! The annoying access disappeared completely. Also, the process of initiating the available drives of the "System Restore" section in the "System Properties" dialog box is much faster.
I was pretty much certain that I had found the cause but in order to verify it, I re-installed Norton Ghost 15 with the exact installation procedure and settings I followed before. As soon as I rebooted, the problem came back in the exact same manner.
May I ask for some assistance from the forum on troubleshooting & potentially eliminating this problem? Just to avoid unnecessary back & forth, I am aware of the following and am not interested in them as solutions:
(1) Disabling the floppy device in Device Manager
(2) Disabling the floppy from BIOS
(3) Uninstalling Norton Ghost
(4) Swinging a jack hammer at the front of my PC (aiming at the floppy)
Regards.