First off, I really don't like the idea of having my computers getting pre-loaded with anti-virus stuff that times out after 30 days. It's very annoying. But I could live with it if the stuff would uninstall.

But in my experience, it doesn't. My Dell came with Norton Internet Security and it is extremely invasive. But it's more than just invasive, it's crummy in quality.  For instance, it flags any VB script running with an error saying that a "malicious script is trying to run." Talk about lazy programming. So those of us who can figure out how to turn off that stupid script check have to do so if we want to use any widget programs that make use of VB Script.

But then there's the invasive "virus scanning" of Office docs.  Yes, I know that there are macro viruses, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to turn that off.  Eventually, it expired and instead of being nagged, I decided I would just take the program off.  Good luck.  In add remove programs it tells me I don't have proper access to uninstall it (even though I'm logged on as an administrator).  It suggests I "login to Norton Internet Security" to do it.  So I open up the program and the whole area to do that is grayed out.

Somehow its virus scanning on Office documents got messed up. That's actually what started this little journey. I couldn't load up my spread sheets or open up MS Word because it would hang on the virus scanning that I never asked for in the first place. 

I eventually had to weed through the various services running on my system, turn them off, and then go to the drive and start deleting the actual Symantec files from my drive. Only then was I able to get back to being able to load up Word and Excel files.  But I couldn't help thinking about how many other people out there are running into problems like this.  This overkill invasive crap on the system almost certainly causes more trouble than it solves. Whoever set the defaults on these programs should be flogged. I suspect 99% of problems with viruses and security come from a handful of places and that those could have been set as the defaults.  But no, it's defaults are so invasive that if some problem comes up, you're going to be left with a broken system with no easy way to recover from it.