About 3 weeks about an official looking window popped up on my screen after I had been away from it for some time. It said something to the effect that a Norton update had failed to load due to some error. Please click here to restart to complete the update. I didn't give it much thought and click it.
I left again and came back later to a screen that looked like it opened in the safe mode, but when I started exploring, I found all my programs and data files had vanished as if this was an out-of-the-box computer. I was freaking out. I downloaded browsers and set them up, etc until the computer was at least online-functional. I shut it down when I went to bed and the next morning when I booted it up, everything I had done the night before was erased.
In desperation, I reset Windows (it took about 4-5 hours) and when everything was finished, I still had to reload programs but my data files had been restored (thank goodness).
As I said this was weeks ago. Now, an hour ago that same Norton window (fake, I'm sure) appeared. I had to go through task manager to close it...but then I noticed Norton wasn't running. I'm guessing somehow whatever this things is, it somehow shuts Norton down before it can detect it. I restarted Norton 360 and everything seems to be otherwise normal.
I just thought everyone should be aware of this whatever it is.
How did you determine that Norton wasn't running? The latest Norton update causes the Norton icon in the system tray to disappear, so if that was the symptom, it was due to the update and the program did not actually shut down. If the program really did shutdown it may have been caused by the update process where something got hung up. Norton crashing is extremely rare, but it does happen on occasion. Without seeing the restart notice you got from Norton it is hard to say if it was fake or not, but my guess is that it was legitimate, especially since there was a recent program update that requires two restarts to install completely.
Thanks. That makes sense as a possibility. But how do you explained that when the real/fake window appeared this time, Norton had been shut down? I've never had Norton just shut down before.
From your description it is hard to know if the popup was legitimate or not. Norton will sometimes notify users that a restart is needed to finish installing an update. It also sounds vaguely like when Windows rebooted it may not have been able to load your profile, which sometimes happens. When that occurs, it creates a temporary profile and yes, everything you are familiar with will be missing. You can usually get back to normal by rebooting a time or two. This may be one of those instances where two issues occurred simultaneously even though they are unrelated.