dermod -

I had a McAfee that came free with a machine. My main reason for getting rid of it and going back to Norton, aside from consistency with my other machines, was that McAfee has an "ad-sponsored" website as their only contact, and every time I visited their site I had to run both Ad-Aware and Spybot to clear the average of 18 objectionables that McAfee loaded to my machine with each and every visit. Links on their site that were offered as answers to a specific search term you'd entered turned out to be an advertisement for something completely unrelated. Popups were abundant, and some search results took you offsite without warning that you were leaving McAfee's "secure" site. Their AV program is pretty capable. Their website just makes it not worth my time and effort to use it. They claim to be one of the most successful commercial AV suppliers, and the can't afford to run their own support site?

Norton firewall will pop up a notice when malware is detected, and will tell you what it did about it. If you're getting an excessive number of such popups, it just means that Norton is detecting an excessive number of attacks on your system. You probably should find out why you're being attacked, and do something about it; but if you wish, you can turn of the notification feature. All you have to do is RTFM.

Norton will pop up a reminder when a subscription is about to expire. I've never seen any such reminder that did not allow you to elect "don't notify me again" and/or "notify me again in x number of days." If this isn't sufficient, you can change settings to disable all notifications relating to your subscription. All you have to do is RTFM.

If ANY program causes a "freeze up" with WinXP, it usually means that you've screwed up either your WinXP installation/settings and/or the program installation. Usually all you have to do is RTFM. If an obsolete Windows OS freezes up on you, Microsoft has explained that it's a "feature" of the OS.

You may have persistent problems if you've applied options other than the defaults in either your OS or your Norton installation without understanding whether they are appropriate to your individual setup. That means you didn't RTFM at installation.

You may have persistent problems if you've upgraded an older machine to WinXP that doesn't meet the requirements for WinXP, either because of hardware deficiencies or because of incompatible legacy programs. That also means you didn't RTFM at the time of update.

If you're still using a Windows version older than Win2000 or WinXP you have an obsolete and unsupported OS, and there really is no way that Norton or any other add-on programs can provide the kind of protection you should have to be on the web in the current world. If you work at it, you can be reasonably safe; but new threats appear almost daily, and there are numerous ones that can't be reliably defended against by any add-on if you're stuck with an obsolete OS, especially if you expose yourself to attacks by your own web surfing practices. "Safe Surfing" becomes critical.

I've found Norton pretty straight-forward and trouble free, but then I don't have a particularly sophisticated setup or any significantly "deviant" devices or programs. Just a simple ethernet LAN (Workgroup) with 3 to 8 PCs, 3 or 4 printers, a couple of scanners, a half-dozen special purpose USB externals - mostly storage, and a dialup connection. If you've got something complicated, you may have to make adjustments to the default settings in Norton, and you may need to RTFM.

John