I have a little different slant on this question.
Our ISP has a really excellent spam and virus blocking service called "Mail Armory". We haven't seen a single virus in the past couple of years since they started the service.
Why do we need any kind of protection? We live in Maine. All 7th graders (including my daughter) get laptops. We figure that is a prime source of possible infection.
We run the 2001 version of Norton Systemworks, which has been nagging us that it's auto update is about to run out. It seemed pretty obvious that resubscribing to Norton was the thing to do until I started reading reviews on Amazon. A fair number of them (and comments on newsgroups) complain of significant problems during upgrade, and warn that you shouldn't do it. One specifically discussed upgrading from Systemworks 2001 to 2003 with problems, exactly what my situation is. Just upgrading the virus program also seems to have serious problems.
So what is a good path here? We had McAffee a few years ago and hated it due to *extremely* long downloads for new virus updates. We have liked Norton much better, although neither has anything that fits the description of customer service and support. Opinions welcome.
Thanks, Steve Smith