Nah, its not spyware.

Symevent is the Symantec Event based driver which basically controls all of its software. I had a similar issue and thus my defection to McAfee.

My recommendation would to be the following. Boot into safe mode and run the liveupdate manually. There was an issue with Norton 2003 where it would cause a Stop error on boot. If the liveupdate does not resolve the problem, then you may need to boot into selective startup and do not start the symevent.sys file. Then uninstall and reinstall Norton.

BTW...why couldnt you install 2005?