Fully agree on the AOL thing since Car Phone Warehouse bought the UK end of the deal not only has it become far more suseptible to spam it seems to be trading in junk software riddled with trojans, three months on my original contract and after seven years it's going unless they celan up their act.
I ran Norton for a number of years with not a single problem on several systems and fianlly got rid of it, not because of the system loading issue, nor so much because of software bloat, I dumped it because of the 'Root Kit' it installs via the Recylce bin and though they have taken great pains to deny it's there a number of people have located and removed it only to find Norton a very feeble tool indeed.
As for Spyware and Trojans two products I have and do use are the Microsoft offering, which works fairly well and is quick, and Spybot Search & Destroy which works well out of the box once updated, I like it for it's additional functions, not for the faint hearted though unless you really now your system and the added bonus of the immunize facility means that once used the utility need only scan for any newer problems than those listed and I don't think that 12 minutes for two 350gb HDD is a bad trade off once a week.
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html (Note: use the Safer-Networking #1 server to update for best results in the UK)
The freebie Zone Alarm mentioned is also worth downloading, it too has a spyware scan function though it only looks for the latest and greatest ect and can and does often miss the exotic one's.