Mircosoft and Norton

I switched from a Macintosh to a PC four years ago. I was forced to do it - against my very fibre of warps and woofs - for two reasons: (1) my mac up and died, (2) all the decent Torah software (e.g. the Bar-Ilan CD-ROM, Dagesh) were written exclusively for the PC. So I switched. And I have hated my (computer) life ever since.

Macintosh has largely been free from the evil influence of Bill the Gates and all of the ancillary problems; in fact, while I think Microsoft makes and markets barely disguised trash, it's the fact that it's the most popular platform that attracts the greatest threats: spam and viruses. Your run-of-the-mill mamzer anarchist writes viruses and spyware for Microsoft software first and then decides to zombie up Macs later. As such, to use a PC, I need to use powerful virus and spyware protectors. Which leads to my second horrific purchase: Norton Anti-Virus.

It's taken a few years of abuse till I finally realized that most of my problems with Microsoft - and the main program I use, Internet Explorer - have been caused (probably) by Norton Anti-Virus. I have purchased a new AV program - Kaspersky Lab Security - and we'll see if I can un-install Norton and if my maddening problems cease.

What problems you ask? (Note, I've seen people complain about the same things, so I assume my irritations are from Norton):

1. EVERYthing runs slow - opening programs, documents, sending/receiving mail; I compare it to our post-9/11 immigration inanities (which my wife just went though, needing a frick-frackin passport to go to CANADA!);
   
2. my system freezes and crashes from having "ccApp" balloon in size, taking all my RAM, restricting use for other programs
   
3. Internet Explorer becomes impossible to use - and this is what prompted me to finally dump Norton - I was at first restricted from seeing videos from Youtube (and I can no longer download them - at all - using my favorite devices). Originally I thought this was a IE cruelty and so I tried to (finally) switch to Mozilla... but I was prevented from downloading it! I thought this was a vicious MephistoBillgatesian trick to preserve IE's monopoly. But the more I investigated, I realized it was instead a Norton cruelty.
   
4. The Youtube/Mozilla indignity was the last straw. While Gates would be mean enough to prevent a download of another web browser, Norton was just being a shoddy project... and I should have realized that this fit the pattern of over a year whereupon Norton has "protected" my homepage from being hijacked (a decent idea) by making Norton's homepage my permanent - never can switch it - homepage. Yes, they hijacked me in the name of my security. And they have eliminated cookies so I need to sign into every website each time and I can't use scripted windows in blogger, blah blah blah

Note, all these problems could still be caused by Gates and IE, but I'll know which way is up soon.