Joe: What version is your NS, including service pack level?  This will be critical in answering your question.

but I haven't had any issues running the agent up from SP2 up to SP4 on Windows 7. If you you can't interact with the program, I suspect you may have not checked the user interaction required, which is still hanging around (although, strangely not on all tasks). Are you running a quick task? Managed Delivery? Do the Altiris Agent logs have anything relevant to say?

Its the new "hourglass" for W7.  Also referred to as the blue donut etc.

I've seen similar behaviour but have never been able to track down the cause.  Usually a full remove and re-install of the agent resolves the issue.  I don't consider that an appropriate long term solution and I suspect there are still some stability issues in the SMA on W7 for Symantec to resolve.  If you have a way of re-producing reliably in a VM I'm sure the SMP devs would be interested!

If you deploy a few managed software delivery packages and run some inventory collections, you will find that after a while the GUI will just hang.

You have to restart the machine. During the logoff process you get the 'Symantec Management Agent is not responding... end now ect'.

We've yet to figure it out either.

WinXP Pro SP3, Agent v7.0.7416, NS7

same issue here Rhys, MR1 did not seem to resolve this issue.  

I just opened a case with Symantec last week because we've been seeing this an awful lot as well.  I'd be very curious to know what you see in the agent logs when this is occurring.  The Remote Altiris Agent Diagnostic tool is very useful for this (https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=49683&p=1).  Our help desk keeps getting calls about slow PCs, and the first thing that they see is that the AeXNSAgent process consuming considerable CPU.  If they try to launch the GUI they see the same thing you are describing.

I really thought this had to do with a botched Application Metering Plug-in removal (https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=48715&p=1), but I've seen the problem come back again after a couple of days on a machine that I had "fixed".  Restarting the machine, however, doesn't always take care of the issue for us.  It's usually a re-install of the agent.  I'm pretty desperate to get to the bottom of it.

The release notes for ITSM SP2 MR1 say it includes a fix for Inventory:

"When the Inventory runs, the InvProvider.dll causes the Altiris Agent to stop responding. for more information, see the knowledge base article 52072"

kb.altiris.com presents a broken page for this KB and the secure KB's present little more information than the above. 

I've not seen MR1 in a larger environment to measure whether this reduces problems yet.  Can anyone else comment?

It's the Symantec Management Agent service.

Restarting it brings the agent back to life. But it will, without a doubt, hang sooner or later.

Could be a quick fix for your service desk? We've created a DS job that does it.

Reinstalling doesn't resolve the problem for us. It happens with every one of our computers (~1,200).

Interesting about the CPU usage too. I'll have to have a look at that. We're all running relatively new machines though (dual cores with 4GB RAM).

Jessek - if you could keep us updated that would be fantastic.

WinXP Pro SP3, Agent v7.0.7416

Seems to make things a bit better.

I.E., when the agent would have previously been unusable (say, after x hours), it is just very slow, but functional. I've still seen it grind to a halt though, but just not as often.

They said something about the agent smashing the XML files. *shrug*

Maybe contact them and see if they can help you out.

I might just have to ask for that dll.

I'm working on a theory that its related to a non-standard install location for the agent - can anyone else confirm/deny?

I am wondering if moving / deleting all agent log files except the current one it is using would help?  (so delete / move all but agent.log).

I mean is there really a reason to have 20+ agentXX.log files all of which are 100KB each?

I'd love to get the DLL, but our support ran out as of a few days ago, and were still waiting on the merger to smooth out before we go relicensing the software.