| PC for 3+ years now. It came free with the HP system and I extended
| the license for 2 more years for $30. That was a good deal

It's a good deal compared to what it used to cost. Not
so long ago it was $70 just for the System Works software.
But now there are several well-regarded AV programs that
cost nothing. (I don't know how or why that makes sense
for those companies, but they are free.) Given the history of
Symantec I think there's no question that they would charge
you a lot more if they could get away with it.

If you don't know anything about Symantec's history
then you have no reason to avoid supporting their business.
But you still paid $30 for two years worth of a product
that's easily available for free. I think that fits with my
characterization of "unwitting". I don't mean to be insulting. I
just hate to see people taken in by sleazy companies.

There are a number of products that one just has no reason
to pay for, yet companies get away with selling those products
at a high price simply because the general public doesn't know
the facts. One can often find such products on the shelves
of software stores. Among them are AV, ZIP programs, CD/DVD
writer software, FTP programs, audio editing programs, music
player software, image viewers and hex editors. In all cases those
programs are available free, and the free versions are among the
best.

A truly bogus category is "cleaners" that claim to power up
your PC by removing bad Registry entries and unused junk files.
But lots of people buy that stuff. Those programs are 99%
useless. (They're 100% useless if you check and clean your
TEMP folder occasionally.) The typical Registry "cleaning"
procedure, removing hundreds of "faulty" entries, is roughly
equivalent to removing an old ballpoint pen from your packed
garage. The pen might truly be rubbish, but disposing
of it doesn't make your garage any more useful or any easier
to navigate.

If you don't think that's true then I invite you to look into
what Registry entries are removed and what their function is.
You'll find that the entries generally fall into 2 categories:

* Settings for software that's been removed. Those settings
are harmless and might be useful if the software is ever
re-installed. They take up less room than the ballpoint pen.

* HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\* These would be settings
for components that have been removed, probably when
software was uninstalled. Again, those settings are harmless.
If some software wants to use the specified component you'll
get an error whether the setting is left there or not, because
the component is gone.

But isn't it inefficient for this extra stuff to be left in the
Registry? No. There are several MB of data in the Registry.
Those unused settings might take up 1-10 KB. If you run a
Registry monitor while starting up Internet Explorer you'll
see that IE accesses the Registry *thousands* of times in
about 1 second when it loads. That's stunningly efficient.
To improve that speed by some fraction of a microsecond
would be trying to improve on the speed of instant.
You wouldn't buy a tool that promises to make your garage
door open faster by removing a ballpoint pen from a shelf in
the back of the garage. That's basically what Registry cleaners
claim to do.

All of that kind of thing could be broadly regarded as crapware.
It's not necessarily all bad software, but it's all stuff you don't
need and definitely shouldn't pay for.