Finder, Mail, Safari gone haywire - ripping my last hairs out!

Question

Ever since I installed Leopard on my dual 2.0 G5 (early 2005 model), the Dock, Mail, and to some extent Safari have gone nuts. With no discernible pattern, every once in a while, when I click on Mail in the Dock, all I get is a Finder window showing my Applications folder with Mail. If I launch it from that Finder window (which it sometimes will do, other times not) Mail then acts very strange, automatically opening a new email message (that I can't get rid of without force quitting), and not allowing me to get into my mailboxes. It doesn't "freeze", but it might as well. All I can do is restart the machine.
When the above happens in Dock, Safari then sometimes goes nuts as well. When I click on a menu bar bookmark, a new tab opens, but Safari doesn't function properly. It just keeps opening new tabs.
Additionally sometimes, again with no discernible pattern, no matter what (anywhere on my desktop) I try to click, I get a little window with "options" that won't let me do anything (I have to restart).
I've had to restart my machine more times since I installed Leopard two weeks ago than I have for the entire time I've owned it. So far I'm way less than impressed with Leopard's functionality, and I'm having flashbacks to the six weeks (or more) I spent trying to get my trusty old Apple II functional when I "upgraded" from System 6 to System 7 all those years ago. I still have grey hairs and wrinkles from that fiasco.
Please, please, please tell me I'm not the only one that this is happening to, and that there's an easy fix.
I really don't want to call Apple, since the people in Bangalore don't have a clue (all they can do is read from their scripted flow chart).
I'm pulling what's left of my hair out here...
Thanks for any help!
Butch

Answer 1

Hi Noel, you are welcome;~[)
I went to Activity Monitor and quit this in my user directory, but there is another process called "Norton Privary Con" in root which won't close, even if I enter the administrator password.
Will this disappear if I uninstall this app?
PS Don't mean to sound dim, but how exactly do I uninstall it?!?
You do not sound dense; ) it is not a fun group of products to unistall
did the software come with an unistaller ? They generally do not work,
generous of them, eh?
The process should halt, it just goes to show just how top dog it is running
in Root, is this a process you saw in the Activity monitor ?
Perhaps you should post a question in the Unix forumrequesting if there is a command to halt it's process with sudo, using Terminal.
In the meanwhile It maybe best to continue searching for an uinstaller for your product expressly Symantec Norton Privacy Control 2.0.4
Go to their site and see if you can find an unistaller, I will continue to look as well.
Here is a link to Uninstall NOrton.
However it may leave behind some files.* depending on which Norton you have installed.
Download and run Cocktail in "Interface" > "Finder" choose
to see "invisibles". Or use OnyX
After the unistall.
Look for files like these on the top level of your hard drive:
/Norton FS Volume 2
/NAV Mac 800QS File
/Norton FS Data 808K
/Norton FS Volume
/Norton FS Index
Find those files drag them (not command-delete) to
the trash and empty it.
Know that uninstalling NOrton can cause Kernel panics it was true for
my machine others, including a user here in Safari very recently.
At least you will know what the origin is.
Regards,
Eme