Thoughts on Norton Internet Security 2005?

I heard a lot of good things about Norton Internet Security 2005 and was
very impressed by the write-up and comparison to McAfee in PC Magazine.
Norton Antivirus worked well for me, but my BlackIce was starting to give me
problems, so I decided to give it a try. It has been installed less than 2
weeks and it blew me out of the water. After the update on Wednesday night,
Microsoft Outlook was no longer able to send/receive any e-mails. Turning
off the firewall corrected the problem. I tried everything to correct the
problem, but eventually had to uninstall and reinstall NIS 2005 to get
everything working again. In working the problem, NIS 2005 also ended up
hanging number of times when I was trying to make simple changes among the
various options.

I am interested in if others are having similar challenges or if this was
just a fluke and it will be smooth sailing from here???

 

smooth sailing like the titanic perhaps. NIS is an unmitigated piece of crap
IMHO. I've been working on PCs for going on 9 years now, and each successive
version of Norton suites has gotten bigger, more bloated, and more
hypersensitive and fickle about the configuration of the PC it is installed
upon, culminating in probably the worst abominations I have seen to date,
the 2004, and 2005 versions.

 

I have seen a similar problem with NIS 2005. I installed NIS to a Win98
machine w/Firebird email client. Internet access is through Comcast
cable. After installation the email server was not available, tried
Outlook Exprerss client, same results. Had to turn off Personal Firewall
and Privacy Controls to restore email access.
Thanks for the tip; I'll re-install NIS 2005.

To be clear: Are you saying that NIS worked OK until a product update
was done (LiveUpdate?) some two weeks after initial installation? I
installed from a CD and LiveUpdate was run immediately after
installation, a lenghty process.

 

You know you really have to have a special kind of love for a product that
is labelled the "2005" version, and it requires a mammoth 33MB worth of
updates right out of the box. Pretty goddamn pathetic, but status-quo of
what we have come to expect from Norton. Look at what dialup users have to
contend with in using such a program. Pretty much dedicating their
connection solely to the chore of updating Norton for the span of a couple
of hours depending on the connection quality. Gotta give you a real good
feeling about that product after going through that kind of hassle.

 

I do tech support for dialup and DSL customers and I can say almost without
fail NIS always screws something up and ends up disabled. I go as far as
telling customers not to buy or install it, and if they use regular Norton
Antivirus, please disable email scanning, it sucks.