I was doing the live update manually, I just hadn't noticed until today that they deffinition date wasn't changing.
so I went the symantec sight and downloaded them and ran the .exe so far (half way throught the smaller drive) I've got 5 trojans, that where missed before.
I guess someone could have wrote one to disable the deffinition update?
tricky way to go if they did, as I suspect most just update with the live-update feature.