I have a report so bizarre that it needs to be documented here. The fix above does not work for me. The behavior continues in spite of exclusions, *even when the NAV process is terminated*. In fact, the only thing that prevents it is running NAV and telling it to disable auto-protect. Here is the complete history of my current attempts:<br><br>I killed NAV (version 4) and installed PP2.3. Once again there was a 2min freeze at 71%. I rebooted and told NAV to exclude PP.exe (via the browse button). No difference. I changed the exclusion from the full path to PingPlotter.exe, then PINGPL~1.EXE, then the parent folder (include subfolders). No difference each time. Initially I had told it to exclude everything except boot sector stuff, but I soon changed this to all exclusions. I reverted to specifying the full path to PP.exe and added the LPNG.DLL, .CNG, .HLP and .INI files in the same directory, no difference.<br><br>At this time I observed that killing the NAVAPW32.EXE task didn't help. However, running it but disabling it through the systray *did* (which is what I discovered in my previous report).<br><br>I then monitored the activity with WINTOP. What happens is that initially the CPU for the Explorer task goes to 99.9+%, then PP starts and its CPU goes to 99.9% for a while. There is a period when the system hangs for about 30 seconds, then PP appears and everything is fine. There is no evidence of excessive I/O during this time.<br><br>This behavior extends to *right-clicking on PP.EXE in the Explorer window*! This causes Explorer to max out on CPU, then the context menu comes up, at which point selecting the properties causes the same effect, and then when the property popup appears, selecting its version tab causes it again.<br><br>No other file does this, and I have never seen this behavior before. Neither could I find out anything about it on the Symantec web site. It's as though when PP was being installed, NAV put some kind of code inside it (I know how bizarre that sounds and I don't really believe it, but I have no better explanation; in other words, I'm lost).<br><br>It occurs to me that there must be some persistence on my system that I don't know about since PP2.3 knows it is registered, yet I uninstalled the previous PP first and never entered my registration code for PP2.3. This might have something to do with it.<br><br>I gotta revert to my previous PP and wait for another one to come out, I'm afraid.<br><br>