Norton supposedly updated and now my CPU usage is stuck at 100%

I did an update to Norton today, and afterwards decided to Optimize Disc. What should’ve finished normally, did not. The disc optimization stopped, apparently canceled and I get the red X on the Norton icon that tells me I’m at risk. So I decided to do Norton Repair in the Help / Support options.

I had Task Manager up, and all of a sudden I am FLOODED with many exe processes going on in the background, all I’m unfamiliar with and tied to Norton. My CPU usage also maximizes at 100% and won’t go down, overheating my system.

The exe processes I see are the following:
icarus.exe
icarus_ui.exe
nllToolsSvc.exe (seems to be hogging the CPU)
AvBugReport.exe
NortonUI.exe (sometimes 1, other times as many as 6-7 appear)
aswEngSrv.exe
aswidsagent.exe
wsc_proxy.exe
Some appear briefly, others stick around. I can’t cancel these processes at all despite being the Admin, I get a message that it can’t be completed and my access is denied. My computer is lagging because it’s stuck at 100% CPU and if it continues my hard drive will be fried. Restarting has not fixed this, I am currently forced into Safe Mode unable to figure out what to do.

Control Panel shows 2 Norton installations, 22.24.8.36 and 24.10.953.1052. I can’t even uninstall one of them, nothing happens, even in Safe Mode. I tried disabling NortonAVDumper64 and NortonVPN in the MSCONFIG option for start up, but nothing changed.

Someone please help me, why did this happen??? My computer is going to overheat and damage itself if I can’t fix this.

An update: I manged to uninstall the older Norton outside of Safe Mode, but since this STILL didn’t fix my lag issues, I had to uninstall the latest one too. I had to do it in Safe Mode because the lag was that bad and left it stuck at 2%. Now there’s no more lag and no more Norton installations.

Is it even ok to reinstall Norton again after all that??? I still have a subscription, but my PC can’t handle all that lag again if the latest version is going to hog all my resources.

Why did it do this unprompted update? Why did it have so many processes running and deny me from shutting it down despite being the admin?

I had a similar experience after the update with very high CPU use. What seemed to resolve it for me was to restart my computer. Restart not shutdown and startup again.

I had to uninstall Norton entirely and reinstall it, which only allows me to install this garbage version 24. What even is this update? I have no clue what anything is anymore or if my system is now screwed up because of this.
norton_issues
Look at all this. My system is saying I’m not protected, yet going into Norton says I am? Nothing I do changes anything. A “quick” scan takes an hour instead of a couple minutes. I get pop ups about ports or whatever and I don’t know if I should be allowing them or think someone’s actually trying to get into the computer. If I have Firefox running, I got like 70+ processes going on heating up my computer, are all these new processes really needed? What even are they? I got 2 Norton programs in my task bar, no idea if this is a bug in the update or some remainder stuck in my computer I can’t remove. Is there anyone that can actually help me?

Hello. 22.24.8.36 was the version before the 24.xx release. Obviously something went amiss with your upgrade install. If you have not used this tool already use it to remove Norton. This tool is for the 24.xx installation:
https://www.norton.com/nortonremover

In the event that version 22.24.8.36 remains on the system then run this R&R tool and do a removal only scenario:
https://norton.com/nrnr

When you have both removed, manually find ALL folders that may be remaining that are a part of Avast and Norton. Restart the system, log into your Norton account and download your Norton product again from there.

SA

1 Like

The latest build of Norton 24.xx on my systems is shown below. I run LU on my machines twice daily. I am not being offered 22.10.95301052 at the present time.
version 24xx updated to build 881 11 1 2024

SA

If you read my 2nd post, you can see I already did that and even provided pictures of other things in the 4th post that I’m not sure if are part of ver42 of Norton or the old one. My UI version of this Norton is 1.0.76, and it says everything is up to date. I wanna know why I have all these processes running and if I can disable some of them to prevent overheating, and also why Norton is acting as Admin rather than me when it comes to stopping processes in Task Manager.

I wanna add yet another update: in my Firefox settings, I see the following message at the top: “Your browser is being managed by your organization.”

I have NEVER seen this before and don’t know what this is or how to get rid of it. I ask again: what the hell did this Norton update do to my system? Why is this enabled and how do I disable it?

See this Mozilla Support article. "Your browser is being managed by your organisation" has once again appeared. I have no organization. How to turn this off? | Firefox Support Forum | Mozilla Support

I wanna know what this is:
firefox_norton_issue
What did Norton do to Firefox? Why is this here all of a sudden? This wasn’t here before the update.

fwiw ~ Google:

Why did Norton do this without my permission?

bjm your solution did not help me, setting those options to false did not remove the message and one of them is completely locked to me.

Norton support via Social Support | Chat | Phone [here ]

Regarding: You are unprotected
image

third party VPN?..did you try with VPN off
what DNS server address?..did you try Google Public DNS

I don’t understand why a VPN would be the cause since the only VPN I use is Norton’s and even then I don’t use it all the time, nor do I mess with my DNS settings. This unprotected message fixed itself after some searching, if you turn off certain features (such as say, email protection for example) and don’t click to the ignore it then this pops up. Ignoring/clearing up notifications fixes it. Version 24 thinks shutting something off = totally unprotected despite actually being secure.

Okay. Thanks
Users reporting You are unprotested … some users report using third party VPN &or NextDNS.