(Sorry for being longwinded, trying to cover everything is all!)
This morning I ran Windows update and got the security patches from this tuesday. Norton updated too, everything was fine. Laptop rebooted, everything still fine. Left to get something to eat and about 30 minutes later, I noticed I could not get any websites to load in Firefox OR IE. And I don't mean usual cannot display errors, it flat-out wouldn't do anything. Just sit there. This ONLY affected my browsers, stuff like Skype worked.
I checked Norton for updates again and this time it just sat there stuck. Telling it to cancel didn't do anything. So I shut down and after that, Windows loaded back up and Norton would not. My browsers still did the same thing too. So I ran system restore and afterwards, it said it failed because of virus protection running in the background. Except this time, Norton loaded back up and nothing was wrong! But this time task manager wouldn't open nor device manager. Everything started hanging. I figured I would have to use Windows 8's refresh feature because obviously one of these updates did something. Gave it one more restart and everything seemed fine this time except the HDD access light was running like crazy and it's like nothing would open up. So I gave it a few minutes and everything finally went back to normal. I'm not sure if it needed time to come back after that failed system restore or what, but task manager opens and nothing is out of the ordinary.
However, Norton popped up with the autofix giving this error:
Norton Internet Security
20.4.0.40
Error: 8504, 104
Windows 8
9200.16628.amd64fre.win8_gdr.130531-1504
Norton Autofix Results: 1 item(s)
Installation :: Success
It says it fixed it and hasn't popped up again. It can't find any updates, scans and finds nothing malicious, and for the most part nothing seems wrong at all. So at this point, should I take any action to rule out any viruses it can't find or something? Nothing like this went on until those updates this morning so I'm inclined to think it had to do with them.