NIS slowing machine to a crawl?

From: news (news_at_care4free.net)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 10:11:19 +0000

A friend of mine is running Norton Internet Security 2004 on a 700MHz PC
under Win98 SE. His machine now runs at a crawl, even when it is not
connected to the Internet.

When starting a program by double-clicking on a desktop icon, it often
takes 15 seconds or more for the program to come to life. Pre-NIS, it
was almost instantaneous.

When trying to run MS disk fragmenter, it sits for over an hour without
any disk blocks appearing in the "Details" window, yet the disk is
obviously being accessed. Pre-NIS, the disk blocks appeared a few
seconds after starting the fragmenter.

He updates and runs Norton AV, CWShredder, AdAware SE and Spybot
Search&Destroy every day, and his system is reportedly clean.

Is there any way to select a "safe" NIS configuration that will let the
machine run at something approaching its former rate? (I don't know NIS
at all, so have not been able to help him). 

-- 
Ian