Norton is acting up again (five years in a row). False positive error message?

For the fifth straight year (at least 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015)  some norton update (probably a sub-realease of version 22.7.) is causing the windows notification center to indicate that both Norton and Windows defender antivirus and firewall are turned off.  The status bar icon for Norton appears to be solid green, but since it's reporting that it's turned off, who knows. 

Glitches in updates have always been with us, but the folks at Symantec don't seem to be able to learn from their own mistakes.  Our server goes crazy when it thinks that several workstations are unprotected. Didn't plan to spend today chasing this down. 

Thinking maybe if Comcast leaned on these people there might be a chance that something gets done sooner rather than later. 

Anyone else having this problem?  Anyone want to recommend something better as an alternative?

--Rick