Chris Varner, chief technology officer at DDJ Capital Management in Wellesley, Mass., said customer support has been poor lately. Earlier this week, he called tech support three times before getting an answer to a problem with his spam filtering software, which had simply stopped working.

"On three different phone calls with three different tech support reps we got three different answers," Varner said.

Varner was eventually told the issue was caused by a Microsoft security patch problem that required a labor-intensive fix. "Not only was it an issue that we got the wrong answer the first time, but it was also problematic in that the patch we had to apply took a lot of manual work and manual file copying," Varner said. "To have a Microsoft patch break their product and for them not to notify us proactively kind of pisses me off too."

Thompson said it is normal at the end of the year for the number of technical support inquiries to increase and that Symantec has added staff to address that.

But Ladewig said one problem created by Symantec's merger with Veritas is that instead of just being able to see his Veritas licenses when he logs into Symantec's license support portal, he now sees all the licenses of every department at his university.