If you're familiar with Norton Internet 2008, how can I get it to stop slaughtering my system performance?

I've had it for about 3 months now (on a comp I probably got in 2005). The system performance has been godawful ever since.

Norton is keeping my data safe, but it's also giving me "runtime C++" IE crashes - which I'd never ever experienced before - and it frequently thinks it's running background processes that in fact render my comp useless for five minutes at a time. (Usually the ccsvchst.exe component seems to be the culprit - system usage rarely clears 50%, but the exe file's memory commitment just grows and grows and grows until it decides its done.)

Any suggestions for how I could make this bugger work a little more effectively? I've gone through the options menus and nothing on the surface looks like it makes much difference.

I appreciate the AVG suggestion, but we actually had that at the office - complete with auto-daily updates - and we got rid of it (replaced with some network McAfee thing) because it wasn't blocking enough stuff.

Norton is known to do this to all computers. This is its biggest problem. Try running virus scans less often. As a last resort, I would say switching to a different anit-virus such as Trend (requires subscription) . There are plenty of free anti-viruses that work just fine. You can find them at Download.com (just pick the highest rated one). I use these for my other comp. and its virus free. Hope this helps!

Long answer short, don't use it. It's just bloatware, nothing is going to make it run better.
Check out AVG, I believe the link is http://free.grisoft.com

Uninstall it, its the biggest pile of rubbish , it takes over your pc and slows it down so much, your better of using one of the many free virus progs

best thing to do is to remove it and put a different ani-virus

I have given up on Norton and uninstalled it compleatly,not only was it a resource hog but i still got infected with a virus while useing the expensive pice of junk.
I am now useing AVG on all three of my computers and have'nt had a singel problem and it's not a resource hog,anouther free registy cleaning program allso works well in speeding up your computer.
Have a great weekend

Norton does this. I don't really use my computer for much more than simple stuff, so using Norton doesn't bother me.