Vista - What's a good 3rd party system restore program?

You say you deleted Norton but did you use the removal tool?? There's no way to completely get Norton off your system without using the removal tool. On my Vista 64 PC I was getting reboot times over 2 minutes because the system was trying to load Norton drivers that no longer existed.

If you haven't done the norton removal tool, do it first thing.

I have 400 gigs of free space. I have used disk clean up, defrag, ccleaner etc.

I finally just deleted all old restore points.

Thanks milesahead...

I uninstalled it i think and i will look into the removal tool.

Yes, I found in my services folder that norton was set to run automatically!

I will do a registry search for norton and see what is left.

well, system restore works from safe mode. I also found that several services for backup/system restore were turned off.

I little while ago I compiled a few options. Maybe you find something that suits you. The cheapest is to buy a Maxtor One Touch disk - since you need an external disk anyhow and the Maxtor comes with the imaging and backup programs (Maxtor Manager). I myself use Norton Ghost which I bought before I was aware of the Maxtor option. Ghost works well but it needs a little getting used to. Some of the functions you have to scout for in the interface. Lots of people like Acronis - but I never used it yet.
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If you are running Vista 32 bit prior to SP1 I found I had to do a lot of services tweaking to avoid it hogging the hd. Stuff like shadow copy service though, you should at least have on Manual so that backup and imaging programs can start the service. Also a neat thing on Home Premium is you can use Shadow Copy Explorer(it's in the list of Vista freeware) to get shadow copies of files from the system restore set. It works almost like an undelete program. A cool thing to have if you accidentally delete a file or want to get back an old version.