You have to delete all 'bits' of Norton which can be tricky but the above Norton Removal Tool should work. Anything left will stuff it up. I wouldn't advise anyone to have Norton, it's not even a particularly effective protector.

I got Kaspersky free with Barclays online banking and it is great, unintrusive and much better than Norton which I had before.

Norton uses the Symantec engine which used to be a resource hog but so can some of the others identified here. Here are the results from one of the most well regarded comparative testing organisations.
http://www.virusbtn.com/news/2008/09_02
Testing AV is very hard to do scientifically.
Anyhow all the AV products mentioned here are decent. Symantec have been desperately trying to shake their bloatware tag.
Root kits have a mythical status about them. Keep your system patched and AV up to date and the root kit will be detected before it hits your system. Only once installed does a root kit try and hide itself and even then the products mentioned will detect a root kit.

The main advantage of buying AV is support although my experience of Symantec support is that I teach them about viruses.

And patch your systems now. There is a new vulnerability that has been discovered that potentially could lead to an attacker or worm taking over your system.
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/827267

The Symantec engine is one of the best out there. But you are right about removal. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with AV is that they install 2 products on one computer. It can be fatal for performance.

I switched to OSX. Now the only antivirus I have to worry about is the ones on my customer's infested Windows PCs.

I don't mind Macs its just the users. I still recommend AV for Macs and unpatched Macs are becoming an increasing target due to complacency and vulnerabilities that outnumber those on PCs.

Who said anything about a Mac? I'm a PC user. I just happen to run OSX on it instead of Windows. As to AV on this thing - think not. But don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to Microsoft, if their software wasn't so bug-ridden, flakey and everywhere, I'd be out of a job.

At least you are not a marketing victim. Look at the number of OSX patches compared to the number of XP or vista patches. The last time I fired up OSX it wanted 100 mbs of updates. BTW I have used Macs, PCs, Linux and Unix.

Anyway as I say Mac users are complacent and ripe for a malware attack.

I use COMODO Firewall and Antivirus which are free and very effective.

If I got a new PC with Norton or McAfee I would uninstall them immediately and install COMODO.

I got hit with a root-kit once (and I had Norton anti-virus - no comprehensive security suite though) and I had to re-format and re-install XP as a consequence.

It didn't feel like a 'myth' to me at the time.

****** annoying but plenty of other classes of malware do the same. The tricks used to prevent removal are not that of a rootkit. The idea of a root kit is to prevent detection once installed.

In my experience I find the likely hood of infection is in proportion to the habits of users. That experience is from 9 years disinfecting systems with most of the brands mentioned here. The sites I setup for AV have thousands of users.

The root-kit in question did indeed remain very well hidden until I installed a freebie (from AVG) that specifically weeded out root-kits. I attempted to use 'HijackThis' (which worked when I removed a root-kit from my BIL's PC a few years before) but it failed to work in the most recent instance.

Running the 'NoScript' Firefox extension is probably one of the best ways to currently prevent a cross-site (XSS) scripting attack (which is becoming a very popular method of attack right now) and which is not currently caught by most Security Suite applications.

Funnily enough I just got off the phone with Symantec's PR/marketing bod here in Australia regarding a (less than glowing) article I did on their products. They started off by saying that what I'd written was slanderous - I pointed out that it was only slander if it wasn't true and that I could demonstrate every criticism I'd made of their product.

So they changed tack at that point and said their new product, NIS 2009, was a complete rewrite which had been getting glowing reviews everywhere. I've been reading those reviews and it seems to me that most of the reviewers are just ****ing amazed that it functions like a half decent antivirus package and not the horrendously bloated, IE breaking shitstorm that typified every other Symantec product from 360 v.2 backwards. The good independent antivirus labs place NIS2009 towards the upper-middle of the order of good packages.

Two things are worth mentioning at this point. Firstly, AWIL's Avast appears above NIS2009 in just about every test apart from the false-positives and has the advantage of being free. Secondly, if you go and have a read of Symantec's very own user forums you'll find a large number of end-users suffering from the same old Norton-releated hassles. Thirdly, Norton's customer support continues to be one of the worst in the business.

For the record, the antivirus package that came out consistently better than any other, according to all the independent testing labs was this one.

Symantec support is utterly useless and that goes for their corporate products as well.

I used RISC-OS for years: a 4Mb ROM which contained a Windows-like GUI, a word processor, a paint program, a vector-drawing program akin to Corel, a text writer, BASIC and several games and diagnostics.

4 Mb: how does that compare with Vista?

Add in the fact that RISC-OS loads in around five seconds and is virtually immune to malware - being in ROM - how on earth did we ever get into a world dominated by Micro$oft, multi-DVD operating systems, daily patches and Blue Screens?

Rant over.