Norton Antivirus 2009 on Vista is a Liabilty

Today, for the second time in less than two weeks, the first attempt to collect mail after a reboot cause the appearance of a rather unpleasant notification dialog indicating that my Antivirus software has stopped working:

The first time this issue occurred I spent almost four hours online with the Symantec support technicians, having my software removed and re-installed several times without any resolution of the issue. At that point I had to go out, and when I returned the issue was somehow gone. I assumed that some component had been automatically updated, and continued on my merry way.

Today, we went through the same remove/re-install rigmarole with no more success. After the technician (who was controlling my computer remotely) went quiet for three or four minutes, then he closed the browser windows and disconnected the support session. Thanks very much.

The really annoying thing is that this is a known issue that Symantec claim will "be fixed in the next support upgrade", but there is no information about when this upgrade will happen, and neither does there appear to be a workaround I can apply until the fix appears, short of falling back to Norton Antivirus 2008. So I suppose that's what I'll have to do.

I'm guessing there are a lot of other people experiencing the same issue, because I started out as eighteenth in line for support. I am now next, and looking forward to going back to the prior release. But that was installed by a Symantec technician in response to a long-forgotten problem with the 2008 product, so I may not be out of the woods even then. If Symantec think I'm renewing at the end of my current subscription period they have another think coming. I have already spent almost a full day without email twice because of this issue, and I've had enough.

For some reason a number of posts were stuck in the blog as drafts. This one is from October last year.