Cannot access files after upgrade

Well. No dice. I'm too frustrated to continue at this point. I'll have to live with my computer being turned into a heap of spiffy looking garbage. What a disaster! However, thank you all for your help. I may have to just bring this into the Apple store now as I think your last instructions are beyond my pay grade.

Oh how I wish I had heeded the horror stories on the App Store!

Hi guys,

Just an update. I managed to uninstall the Norton software on my computer. As many of you suggested, this was indeed a big problem. However I was not able to have any luck with the Norton product uninstall Eric Root linked.

The problem app(s) were Symantec programs to more specific. It was rather difficult to get rid of the stuff. It seemed locked into my computer (literally greyed out on my system preferences and unable to unlock with my user password). It was deeply embedded. Eventually with some internet searching I was able to find a way to erase all programs through Terminal.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH103489

I followed these instructions. But had to do it in a roundabout way because my Finder program was still acting up (I would open the downloaded folder and it would be empty). Eventually I got the kill command to go through by dropping the contents of the folder (accessed through quicksilver) directly into my terminal. My Finder now seems to be working well. There are still problems. My Spotlight in Finder remains nonfunctional (goes to the pinwheel and for a minute before showing no-results). So I may still swing buy the Genius bar tomorrow for some in person help.

However, a big big thank you to everyone on here that took the time to respond to my posts! Thanks for taking the time and dealing with my sizable frustration. (I was about to flip my s**t on Saturday afternoon).

One last question. I was advised by the telephone support staff at Apple to consider purchasing additional memory for my early 2011 Macbook pro (I have 4gb). I think this was probably erroneous advice (at least in terms the specific problem I was dealing with). But I was curious for anyone's thoughts on this. I generally don't run too many big programs (this is a work computer that mainly functions as a word processor and research tool, no games, etc.) I tried attaching a Grabbed image from my activity monitor but I could not upload it. When I'm running Firefox, Mail, Word, and a few other smaller applications I have a bit less than 1gb of memory free. Should I contemplate moving up to 8gbs?

Thanks again.