Norton Internet Security 2006: excessive Live Update data

I have three laptops using NIS 2006. All of them received extremely large amounts of data 11/21/07-11/23/07. All had a GB or more in Windows/TEMP folders with names starting SLU****.TMP. At lease 500MB of data also showed up during that period in the Symantec common folder, VIRUSDEFS with names like "TMP****.TMP" (****= four characters.)

Clearly, NIS had a bad several days. I just want to regain my disk space. Tried communicating with Norton in Bombay .. got plastic woman who was not able to tell me if the TMP****.TMP folders in the VIRUSDEF folder could be deleted. There were very few others there with that name convention and there were 42 folders from the two days in question. This was true on all three of my systems. Anyone else have this experience and does anyone know if I can safely remove the TMP****.TMP folders? I've deleted all the WINDOWS/TEMP folders. I know NIS sucks .. it's just hard to make the transition to something else.