I have a situation where I use a Win7 computer to maintain some legacy software. I have some 3-rd party development tools that will not work with Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 8 or later - some crucial dll's are updated that cause them to not function properly. Other updated MS software may also do this, but I know for sure that IE does. It has been difficult to maintain this, as any updates to MS products may update some of these system files. Then I need to use a system image to revert back to a working environment.
I find that I need to turn off MS updates to keep this working, so any modern virus-handling capability from them is not applied to this system. I do keep Norton Internet Security updated on it and am wondering if this is enough. Is there some sort of communication between Norton and Microsoft so that Norton can provide the same occasional security/malware updates, or other Norton capabilities that provide equivalent protection? Can I depend on Norton to keep the system protected and not have to also rely on MS updates?
Of course I could just take this computer off my network and rely on sneaker-net to get things transferred back and forth.