Seriously, Norton has a few uninstallers to remove the trash left behind from its supposedly first uninstall. They obviously don't want it as public knowledge, so they're well hidden on their site.
I've got an HP, which came bundled with McAfee. You know what they say, the manufacturers bundle everything just right, right? McAfee was a crash prone mess, so I went and got NIS2002. It worked good for over a year, but one particular update gave many headaches, including me, so I dropped them.
Speaking of reinstalls, I'm a believer in formatting. Winduhs over itself is a house of cards. I had a friend who also ran NIS2002 and after a simple reinstall he couldn't install Norton, because Winduhs was still reading Norton's trash in the registry. The install would go so far and then hang. Only a complete wipe fixed the problem.
I had a run-in with someone a while back, saying I was more or less crazy about the "house of cards". Obviously he didn't understand how Norton, as one example, wraps a gazillion tentacles into every part of your machine. Why press your luck running on a half trashed registry that made you reinstall to begin with?
Hang in there….
Nothing wrong with a bare metal restart but I've found since Win 98 if you watch what you install and use a registry fixer it's rarely necessary.