we been using AVG for a couple of years now on 3 lots of PC's we've owned during that time and its always been top notch - tried norton etc and they are fine but then of course they're not FREE!!
so if your cheap and use the PC predominately for chatting and your own word stuff as we do - AVG it has to be.
however if you download a lot of other stuff - music movies etc from various sources perhaps you'd be better with a more robust type of AV software - like Norton - compared to replacing your PC or paying for repairs its cheap
yep its easy to remove Norton but I did a search for folders and files including hidden for "symantic & Norton" as well and deleted manually. Even so there may be a couple of "Norton files" lurking someplace but no probs so far.
I'd recommend using the Norton removal tool from the support section as it gets rid of all the files usually left behind by the normal uninstaller. You can get from
Have a look at this thread, it may help you. (4th comment down)