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After I referred to Norton AntiVirus as "horrible" in my immediately preceding entry—What exactly is Microsoft trying to do to Firefox on my system?—I did not elaborate within that entry because I think the topic warrants its own entry, albeit a fairly short one.
There are several ways in which I think Norton AntiVirus is horrible: automatic installation of unwanted Windows Explorer add-ons; forced system restarts (with no option to decline and manually restart later); tedious updates that sometimes require several incremental updates and several system restarts; full-system virus scans that tend to get stuck indefinitely (possibly hours) on single items (including a folder that seemed to be completely empty); the absence of a simple way to scan a particular file or folder with Norton AntiVirus 2007 under my 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Professional (something previous versions of Norton AntiVirus offered via context menus under Windows XP, although I have not tried Norton AntiVirus 2007 under Windows XP or an older version of Norton AntiVirus under Windows Vista); the degree to which it slows down a computer upon which it is running; and its dubious security recommendations. Norton AntiVirus also used to be hideously ugly, but Norton AntiVirus 2007 is significantly less ugly than previous versions I have used and either way, system security obviously trumps aesthetic impressions of security applications.
That is a lot of suckage for one application; if that much suckage doesn't make an application horrible, I don't know what does.
