Thanks. FWIW, I love NIS and have had no problems with it. PC Mag gave the 2010 suite "best in class", including system resource consumption. To each his own.
Several sources have stated that Norton went through a significant change [program rewritten in 2009] in the last 2 years. I tried it many times in the distant past [1990's-2003ish] and it was nothing but ONE BIG HEADACHE! What I found most frustrating and distressing was that once you installed it, you could not even get a clean uninstall on it, which I found to be terribly distressing. They did finally come out with a separate program so you could uninstall it and even that would not work at times.
Norton had a reputation of being good originally [in fact, they were pioneers in the antivirus industry], then made the mistake of trying to ride on their reputation rather than upon staying sharp and on the cutting edge.
In the last 2 years they have come a long, long way [system resources are no longer such a terrible hog, software bloat not so big anymore, uninstall is easier, etc.] but they have lost my vote and confidence a long long time ago.
You could not PAY me to install it on any of my systems, EVER!
For most professionals, Kaspersky, BitDefender, Eset NOD 32, and Webroot are the top 4 now in the industry.
To be 100% honest with you, I have had problems with both Bit Defender and Kaspersky as well as AVG [so sorry DM], and have finally gone to Microsoft's newly released Security Essentials. I have never had a problem with Microsoft SE, but I have also only been using it for a few months now.
Microsoft's SE [Security Essentials] is safe, effective, thorough, and best of all, FREE! Software bloat is nonexistent, it does not hog your resources, and uninstall is quite simple and easy. I have installed it on many computers in the last few months and no problems whatsoever. It is totally user friendly too.
Hope this helps!
Soar