Norton programs scatter more garbage into the registry than any other. The programs are about 75% larger than they need to be. It has interfered with other programs and crashed systems even while it was not running. As Capt said sometimes it is nessary to reformat and do a clean install. First try disabling running at start-up.
As far as the xp firewall it is not very robust and it only blocks incoming packets. The free one mentioned above is fine. I prefer Armor2 because of it ease of setup especially with a LAN. It is also tops in protection.
The free spyware removers are ok. I have used Spy Sweeper to fix problems where the others have failed. One example is where one of the free ones removed a maleware but left registry entries. At every start-up you would get a missing dll file error. I purposely put the maleware back on and removed with Spy Sweeper and it removed all registry entries pointing to the maleware to load, no more errors. The real time guards are superior to others. It takes more programming and testing, that is why it is not free.
AVG always seems to beat out the not for free ones. I will pay for something over a free one if it is better but here there is no reason to.
AS I said, computer geek, not grammar expert.
Capt, is that picture from the X Files?