Thanks for the comments. This one in particular is interesting given the relevance to my situation.
"have come across some information suggesting that any problems caused by ccApp.exe(system crashes or hangups) were easily resolved by disabling the Norton outgoing E-Mail virus check."
I've not (yet) had any problems with crashes, and so far the hangups I'm having are more annoying than anytyhing else since they've been happening only at the point of initiating a system restart. However, as to your comments quoted, I did in fact recently experience for the first time significant complications that occured subsequent to some kind of glitch/hack (either, or, I am still don't know what happened.... probably never will) that occured during the scanning of an outgoing email. This in itself was strange in how it appeared to me....clicking on Send Mail generated what appeared to be the normal Symantec outgoing mail alert/prompt...... except, the prompt window was a completely empty window, no text, no dropdown box to make block/permit choice, just an empty window, one that bore the familiar color code scheme that I recognized as the Norton Outgoing Email Scan Alert Prompt window. Even more strange is that I've been using the same version of Norton - with all the updates and renewals, for over 3 years, and this one weird send email situation happens within the past few days.
At first, I noticed the send mail glitch, but didnt pay much attention since I was preoccupied and it didn't seem to cause any other big problems, but within the next few hours, I finally noticed the normal norton icons that indicate NAV and NIS as active and running were gone - disappeared from the desktop. The little blue norton globe - gone, the norton icons in the task bar - gone. I then looked in the program groups to try and run them manually, they were there, but upon clicking to run them, there was no visible indications anything happened- I clicked, and re-clicked, nothign happened, no programs opened, no error message. I gave Symantec online support, Auto-Fix a try. It did some kind of scan, and reported having detected three problems, the latter 2 which left me scratching my head even more: 1) "you have corrupted and missing registry keys"; 2) "your version of NAV is no longer supported"; 3) "your version of NIS is no longer supported". The latter two were renewed on-line 3 months ago...... at least, they took my money.
I lost track of how many reboots were done in the troubleshooting, but this allowed me to see over and over how the ccApp.exe was continually causing the shutdown/restart process to hang. All told, I ended up doing a complete uninstall and reinstall of NAV and NIS to get sort of back to normal.
Yeah, I'm with you on some of the other comments. Norton/Symantec really has grown into another microsoft, in more ways than one I fear. Having worked in the field, I noticed somewhere around 10 years ago or so the co-dependency, or more accurately, the tri-dependency computer users are herded into - microsoft, intel, norton/symantec. Some good news in all of this, between having done the uninstall and re-install, I noticed my computer was fast again :) But of course this was short lived after the re-install :( One of these days I may actually follow through on threatening to go unix.