I had to reboot my laptop a couple days ago (required by a Windows Update), evidently while LiveUpdate was in the middle of applying an update in the background. When the system came back up, no Norton systray icon, Firefox couldn't open any URL's, Norton toolbar had disappeared, and NIS (uiStub) wouldn't run from Start Menu. A little investigating with ProcessExplorer showed instCA.exe ("Install Custom Action", child process of ccSvcHost) in a "suspended" state, which evidently puts ccSvcHost in a waiting state and effectively stops NIS in its tracks. ProcessExplorer couldn't "resume". Waited an hour, Still suspended. Tried a reboot, no change, waited another hour, still suspended. Searched these forums from another computer. No useful hits (that I could find on this forum). Guess what? Remove and reinstall. Unacceptable. Yet another case of less-than-robust state-protection around update processing (another would be the infamous 3048,3).
Is there something that can be done (maybe in Safe Mode?) that could clean up the NIS state without a complete removal?
Was running Win7ProSP1/x64, 20.3.0.36 (installer provided by Tony_Weiss 2/27)
Now running 20.3.0.36 obtained directly from norton.com download.