I bought a new laptop in October (Windows XP) which came with two whole months' worth of free Norton AV protection. In December this ran out, so I bought the Norton 2006 upgrade from a shop, installed it successfully from the CD-rom, activated it, did a full scan, rebooted - all as I have done before on my other computers with nary a problem.

But I need to get some live updates, and when I try to log on I get a red alert menu saying that my subscription has expired and it won't download anything. But I BOUGHT the damn upgrade! Its initial installation menu said that I had 366 days left to go on my sub, but something somewhere refuses to recognise this and now I can't get any live updates. I had these expiry notices when the old sub ran out and Norton seems not to realise it's been updated, in spite of my getting all the "successfully installed/activated" messages at every turn. The live update menu does say 2006, and not 2005 so the programme is obviously not confusing the two versions.

I can't take it back to the shop straightaway because it's in the city (Cork) and I live in a farmhouse out in the wilds and won't be back there until after Christmas. I'm just writing in hopes that some of you tecchies out there can offer any suggestions. I've rebooted about a zillion times, turned off the Zone Alarm firewall while trying to access Live Update, scanned - and now I'm all out of things to try.

Can anyone help? Many thanks -