Symantec enjoys making its Norton AntiVirus customer go through product activation so much, it makes some of them do it all the time. At least that's the way it seemed to one reader recently.

"I've been a subscriber to Norton AntiVirus for at least five years, probably longer, and I haven't had a lot to complain about," the reader wrote. "Now I do. The 2005 copy I bought recently, as an online renewal to my longtime subscription, asks me to activate it every time I boot up. Every time. It's a time-consuming nuisance."

In looking for a way to fix the problem, the reader discovered that it's one that has plagued Symantec customers ever since the product activation DRM was first introduced in NAV 2003. "I'm obviously not the only one affected, because there is a special patch for users of NAV 2005 who are suffering from the perpetual activation problem," the reader wrote. "And that seems to be an update of a patch for fixing the problem for NAV 2004, which in turn seems to be an update pf the patch for NAV 2003."

Unfortunately, finding Symantec's help page for what to do when "Your Symantec product prompts you to activate whenever the computer restarts" did not mean the reader's time-consuming ordeal was over. "The instructions for dealing with NAV 2005 involve downloading one or more files from the Symantec website," the reader wrote. "I've tried to do this off-and-on for several days and have been unable to retrieve either Symantec's 'automated support assistant' or the SymKBfix.msi file which is supposed to fix the problem. Downloads begin slow, then stall out completely. I'm wondering if the Symantec website is swamped with requests for the fix and can't handle the volume."

The reader tried getting help from Symantec support, but a series of automated responses to his question proved inadequate. "I could keep trying to follow their instructions, but I just don't have any more time to mess with their problem," the reader wrote when he was about to give up and find another ant virus program. "Way beyond that, I have no confidence at this point that following these instructions will bring me anything except the next one-size-fits-all suggestion. I wrote back to Symantec and asked if they couldn't just please send me the fix as an email attachment. Maybe they will. If not, I'll probably delete NAV in a fit of rage one day when the warning message pops up for the jillionth time, and I'll try something else."

Before that happened though, the reader tried downloading the patch one more time from Symantec's website, and this time for whatever reason it worked. "It came across promptly, and I ran the install and it seems to have solved the problem," the reader wrote. "At this point my copy of NAV seems to have stopped nagging me every day, so I'm satisfied. When my subscription expires, though, I don't think I'll renew -- I don't want to go through all of this again with NAV 2006."