I upgraded last night from NIS 2009 to NIS 2010 by simply installing NIS 2010 on top of NIS 2009. I probably should have beta tested because in the course of a few hours I found a few problems with things not working the way they did in NIS 2009. I posted about them last night, but they've scrolled off the page so I figured I'd list them all in one post with links to my original posts. I'll list them in order of importance to me.
1. The user cannot add auto-protect or manual scan exclusions that are of the format of "myprogram.exe". This is a flat out bug since if you open the "Add Item" window and click the help link, the help file that opens specifically states that exclusions can be of the format of "myprogram.exe" which is supposed to exclude "myprogram.exe" from being scanned regardless of where it is on the drive. This worked in NIS 2009, but gives an error in NIS 2010. If you are curious why I need to do this, see this post. This is my biggest issue with NIS 2010 since it forces me to either add a lot more exclusions than I had for NIS 2009 or exclude an entire subdirectory (which makes this less secure).
2. The Norton Tasks window shows garbage data for "Automatic Updates", when sorted from newest last run time to oldest last run time. This is simple enough to see, just go into the Norton Tasks window and click the arrow next to "Last Run" to change the sorting and look at the values in the "Automatic Updates" column. This is a cosmetic issue, but it can cause confusion.
3. One Click Support doesn't work. I threw this in the list, but I think this is a server problem, not a problem with NIS 2010. It may already be fixed based on what I'm seeing, but I won't know for sure until I get home later tonight.
Other potential issues:
1. Optimizer - NIS 2010 defaults to periodically calling the built-in windows defragmentation program. On Vista this is pointless, since Vista already periodically calls the defragmentation program. On XP it is okay, unless the user has a 3rd party defragmentation program installed. Since no two defrag programs defrag exactly alike this can cause a sort of race condition between the two defragmentation programs. For example, I have Perfect Disk 10 installed. It defragments the drive whenever it detects fragmentation, but it places files differently than the Windows defragmentation program. When NIS 2010 "optimizes" the drive, Perfect Disk kicks in to defrag the drive since it uses a different algorithm (it places files in specific order on the drive). So basically every time NIS 2010 "optimizes" the drive it is more work for Perfect Disk. This ends up degrading performance, not helping it.
2. Performance - I looked through the CPU performance charts and found that the process that used the most CPU times was ccSvcHst.exe which is the main NIS process. Is it possible that measuring performance for all running programs is actually affecting performance?