Norton loads before the OS at the driver level, so its certainly possible that its the AV that's hosing the system.
Try booting off a boot disk, which will tell you if the hard drive is bad. you can make a boot disk from any working copy of windows, or you can boot off the windows install media assuming you've got that.
you can try booting directly in to safe mode by holding either shift or F8 after the bios screen, that will usually bypass the antivirus startup and let you get in and uninstall.
I'd recommend AVG as a better, free solution over Norton:
http://free.grisoft.com
Not affilaited with AVG, just a very satisfied user.