Rating: 
Summary: Does what it's supposed to 80% of the time, but lacks polish
Review: This is the second version of NIS I own. Like the previous one, the software firewall and NAV do a good job most of the time. I say most because, once in a while (esp. with the firewall), it fails to exhibit the right behavior.For example, the firewall has a nasty habit of forgetting the rules you already set up for a specific application. This version is much improved in this regard than the 2001 version, but it sometimes still asks you to set up access rules for an application -- as common as IE! -- repeatedly. I don't know what's got into its "head." I discovered that, for one, Norton can't distinguish between the DOS-style filename and Windows-style long filename, so it thinks it's two separate applications. But there are also other cases where the behavior simply cannot be explained. In addition to the firewall and anti-virus utilities, NIS 2002 comes with parent control (I didn't install this) and ad-blocking. Ad-blocking is a joke. It worked the first day I installed it, and stopped working after that. These little things exemplify the problem with many Norton products of late. They are basically solid, but they have a lot of little annoying "features" -- such as not uninstalling themselves cleanly -- that really make users both love and hate them. Sloppy programming, perhaps because they outsource part of the job to India? I don't know. I just hope Symantec does some homework and make their products more solid and polished. Indeed, if ZoneAlarm did not intermittently and mysteriously break my Internet access, I wouldn't have bought this upgrade.
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