I have been using various Norton security products for many years on PCs running Windows 98, XP and now 7 for the last two and a half years. I have never had any problems at all with Norton until the last few months.
A few months ago, NIS2012 suddenly became very erratic in starting up and the AutoFix dialog would appear. This was very intermittent, the effect of this being that whenever I booted up my laptop, I had no way of knowing whether the boot process would take its normal two minutes or two hours. (This is not an exaggeration.)
After a couple of reinstalls of NIS2012, NIS2013 was released and I upgraded. No more AutoFix errors - but I immediately started getting many runtime errors R6025 almost every time I closed a tab in IE, followed by a Windows dialog that IE had stopped working (when it hadn't). Although this is no more than an annoyance, it became more and more annoying with its sheer frequency. (I have since traced this to be a clash between an add-in and NIS 2013 and have started a thread on here to this effect. This thread appears to have been completely ignored.)
Eventually, R6025 became so annoying that I removed NIS2013 and reinstalled NIS2012. The runtime errors stopped immediately and all was well for a few weeks. At this time, I renewed my subscription for a further twelve months as the NIS2012 problems seemed to have solved themselves.
A short time after renewing, suddenly, and for no apparent reason (no MS patches, no added/removed programs etc), error 8506, 421 started appearing on random occasions and would completely freeze up the computer for a length of time when starting. After several uninstalls and reinstalls, I finally bit the bullet just before Christmas and downloaded and attempted to use the Norton remove and reinstall tool. BIG MISTAKE...it killed the computer completely, and the only thing I could do to salvage my system was to spend Christmas doing a complete system rebuild from scratch. As part of this rebuild, I added NIS2013, the thinking being that the near-continuous runtime errors were definitely the lesser of two evils.
All was well for about ten days with NIS2013 until tonight. The familiar but forgotten freeze-up on startup occurred for the first time using NIS2013, the AutoFix dialog appeared on screen and about 90 minutes later, the usual message that no automated fix could be found appeared with the usual invitation to open the support web site. And as usual, the support web site offered no solution beyond those that I have already tried and none of which have had eny effect at all. The computer is still suffering big time hours later and a couple of restarts have, if anything, slowed it down further. A 3GB differential backup operation that took about 20 minutes last night is still running tonight after nearly two hours and I have not been able to carry out any of the other jobs I needed to do tonight.
So, why have I reeled all this off? Because many visits to this board during the course of these problems have shown that there is a big problem with Norton and no-one appears to have the faintest idea what to do about it. All the 'solutions' that I have seen offered to others with the problem are things I have tried and have found not to work. I have started a new thread because the experiences of others shows that this seems to be the only way to get anyone's attention.
And yes, unless a problem is found quickly (and TBH, I'm not holding my breath), I'll be another customer that Norton loses after many years.
Over to you, Norton...