Well, they keep changing the stuff, don't they? Perhaps your earlier iteration of Norton interacted differently with your earlier iteration of TWS. Or, yes, perhaps another factor was at work. A software expert I am not I do know, however, that I was only able to acheive "non-twitchy" TWS performance once I had uninstalled TWS, uninstalled Norton (SystemWorks), reinstalled TWS, then reinstalled Norton, in that order. To the best of my knowledge, all other variables remained constant -- although perhaps it was some root directory thingy or other bit of computer code arcana that somehow corrected itself. I don't know.
This account is not factually correct. Poor risk management, at the Refco futures operation, Refco LLC, played a major role in the collapse of the parent company. Refco LLC, the futures broker, had a long history of lax risk management, which led to spectacular uncovered customer losses during the financial crises of the late 1990s. These losses were concealed by transferring them to the parent company, and then by shifting them back and forth between the parent company and other conspiring entities. The scheme for shuttling these losses to and fro, and for continuing to conceal them, finally unraveled last fall, and this was what triggered the collapse of the company. It seems possible that Refco would have gone bankrupt in the late 1990s, and wiped out at least some of the segregated customer funds on deposit with Refco, if it had not been for the temporarily successful conspiracy to conceal the losses. It is also untrue that all customer funds are safe. Jim Rogers, and other customers of the Refco futures broker Refco LLC, are suing Refco for transferring their funds from segregated futures accounts to unsegregated accounts at other Refco companies, which then lost the money in bankruptcy. The amount in dispute is roughly one billion dollars. If these accusations are true, then Refco futures customers did lose a billion dollars. So it is incorrect to say that everybody came through OK.