Please help, mixed reports, malware ? virus ? neither ? I am truly stuck

Question

I am having a problem with my relatively new 6month old imac.
Please I am hoping to find some really smart (& hopefully patient)  mac users for help. I  appreciate all the time mac uers help members with there questions. Yuy guys really are an invaluable resource.
So here's my situation a few wks back i started noticing my imac seemed to be running slow, after that different programs like Firefox, and Safari seemed to be freezing and appear to "not respond". But things have been busy and just put it on the side.
Now around July or so Safari seems to be almost totally unstable. i starting being subjected to constant Safari problems like the browser constantly closing, yet FireFox (14.0.1) appeared to be relatively problem-free.
My wife starting finding strang emails that were supposedly quarantined so I decided to run a virus Scan. I went to the app's store to see which virus Scans were popular and downloaded Norton from the  store. I have gotten  mixed results from: my poor Mac being possibly sickened with: Malware (This was what was shown "Sokobanbuild.xsl")  than sometimes the scan appeared to report no problems, and i have been unable to find such a file on my Harddrive
I was under the very naive impression that Mac's were rarely affected to these types of virus and such. I am by no means a mac guru so please be gentle. I tried to search on here and got even more confused, I looked for update to the OS as i thought there was somekind of download avaiklable, but became more confused and frustrated.
Thanks so much in advance, i really appreciate the prescious time everyone takes to read this or help myself or other users.
please I am in a real bind here, and hoping for some sort of solution that doesn't involve me having to re-format the Harddrivre and re-install everything, or booting up with a cd. I was also hoping to upgrade to the new Mountain Lion OS, which I assume I should wait till this gets fixed.
please any and all help would be greatly appreciated, thanks so much in advance !!!!!!
FYI: If this helps here are some of my mac's info:
OS: 10.7.4 (MAc OS only, no windows)
Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory: 4 GB
Firefox 14.0.1
thanks again
- iamTheMustangGuy

Answer 1

In reply to a recent post of mine, madmacs0 responded with an assessment of Norton ... and a more balanced and informative post would be hard to find.   Do read it.
I need to preface my remarks to explain why I have not spoken up on this subject here before.
I was an early adopter of Norton Anti-Virus when Peter Norton owned it. It, along with the even better Norton Utilities saved my bacon more than once when running Apple's Classic OS. At the time I would have recommended it to most any Mac user. Then Symantec bought Peter out and things went rapidly down hill. The last chance I gave them to get it back on track was SystemWorks 2.0 and Internet Security 1.0 back in the OS 9 era. Despite a number of bug fix releases, I had to disable most of it and then remove it entirely. That's the last time I actually ran a Norton product on any of my Macs.
So I have no current experience with either NAV or the new iAntiVirus at this point and can't speak with authority on their worth. So feel free to ignore anything else I may have to say here.
I guess my bottom line would be that I think it has an undeserved bad reputation based on user experience from many years ago. I don't remember the last time I read a first person account of individual user issues in modern times. You chose your words carefully, which is appropriate, but I'll bet there are a lot of "experts" here who condemn it without ever having recent hands on experience.
There are a lot of reasons for their reputation, most well deserved. It's been said that Symantec never invented a single piece of software (not sure that's true any more, either), but rather purchased the works of others to either kill the competition or enhance their bottom line. They were a very different company in those days, with a different management style, etc.
So I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be at least as good as whatever has the best reputation among Commercial Mac A-V vendors today. They seem to be on top of most all the OS X malware, even though they don't spend a lot of time blogging about it. I know a lot of IT professionals who swear by their enterprise level software. I suspect that their software no longer behaves any worse than the others that operate at the kernel extension level (always dangerous for third parties). But their reputation seems to be their unending albatross.
I hope madmacs0 will not mind me copying his post like this.