Hey Wes -
You are absolutely right. In the old days Symantec was much more interested in getting checkmarks on a list of features than providing a small, quick anti-virus solution. So the product became bloated and overloaded with poorly conceived features. And this made the product pretty unstable. 2009 is a big departure from that. They have worked on slimming down the footprint of the product (resource and memory usage) and have made it a viable alternative for anti-virus. They had been doing this for years for their corporate edition (the Symantec AV corporate is one of the better AV products out there).

Now, my normal disclaimer -- I don't use it. I use Nod32 on my Vista box and AVG on my Virtual XP environment on my Mac.

But remember the most important thing. Anti-virus should only be a backup-backup plan. Changing your behavior is much more important. Nobody is trying to send you naked pictures of . So don't open it. Keep up with updates to the Operating System (2nd Tuesday of every month -- coming up next week) and don't go stumbling around the net looking for free music or software.