the corner office

Norton Internet Security 2007 rolled over and died on my XP partition recently, and Norton's website recommended upgrading to NIS 2008, which I duly did. And immediately regretted it.

First gripe, is that Norton decides to add an anti-phishing component to Firefox, adding a big ugly toolbar which steals real estate and chomps even more resources, and no obvious way in any of their byzantine configuration screens to disable it. I don't really want phishing protection - I don't think I'm in the at-risk demographic, but Norton seems to think I'm too stupid to look after myself.

You could just hide the toolbar (View > Toolbars > Hide...), but there's still a rotten little dll in your Firefox folder, getting in the way, chomping memory and doing dog knows what else. If you delete the file, NIS apparently just puts it back. Via this post, the best thing to do is close Firefox, delete coFFPlgn.dll from Firefox's components directory, then create an empty file of the same name, and mark it read only.

Bah.