Good to hear you're now ok, Spanners.
I too have a friend with Nortons trouble. It was taking his machine 5 minutes to shut down, plus other issues. Replaced Nortons with Vet and ZoneAlarm and problem solved.
Also, if your friend is looking for an AV and firewall package, I've found
Trend Micro's Internet Security 2004 to be excellent. I don't know how good the firewall is, I don't use it, preferring
Zone Alarm. However, the Trend Micro installation detected ZA's presence and switched off its own firewall, thereby avoiding a rather common clash.
It's email scanning is excellent and allows other email scanners to be hung off it in series. eg, my email is scanned in this order:[list=1][*]By my ISP at the server[*]By
Mailwasher[*]By Zone Alarm's mail scan[*]By Trend Micro[*]By
Firetrust Benign (disables nasties possibly embedded in HTML email)[/list=1]
Not much bad stuff gets through
AA