Have to agree with bitplayer: avoid Symantec desktop products. I ditched all mine two years ago. Also had similar problems with McAfee. I'm using AVG 7 for anti-virus (www.grisoft.com) and Outpost Pro 2 for firewall (www.agnitum.com). I've also converted all my clients to it. I used to work in IT security so asked some old contacts to try and break these two products using industry strength tools. They couldn't and have switched to using AVG and are trialling Outpost Pro. AVG is also very cheap: 33.30 USD for two years! In the IT Security trade publications, AVG consistently scores 100% virus detection rates. There's a trial of v7 available on the site plus v6 is free for non commercial use and updates are still released for it. AVG also works well with Outlook & Outlook Express and offers plugins for more esoteric e-mail clients like "The Bat!" (www.ritlabs.com). The real beauty about AVG and Outpost is that they can be shut down completely leaving no processes / services running. This is really handy for avoiding conflicts and freeing up clock cycles when rendering.

Cheers,
Mark