The PIL computer has Norton Antivirus 2004 on it and in the past month and a half the machine has been hanging occasionally with the active task (logging, web browsing or emailing) coming up with the hour glass cursor. Killing the process goes through an endless loop of informing MS about the problem and being unable to kill the process. Over the past week and a half I’ve been trying to diagnose the problem by changing bits and pieces on the config and I think I’ve finally tracked it down. The problem is that we need to leave the pc unattended for a period of a day or so to ensure that the problem is fixed (as it often seems to have occured whilst we’ve been away at the computer). It turns out that Symantec have a kb article 2001101111334406 – Computer stops responding when Automatic LiveUpdate runs. Their workaround is to stop liveupdate running and getting the virus updates automatically (which kind of defeats the point of having av updates!) but it does seem to have worked. The computer has been stable for a day and a half and we have had an update warning pop up and the defs downloaded. What annoys me is that they have known about this problem since 2001 and have not fixed it yet.