Hi, no problem with the help.
I believe agents that respond back in with a basic inventory set themselves back to active. What we do when we retire a machine is set the asset to retired then do a disk wipe so that it doesn't have anything on or respond. Machines that are out of the business for a period come back in to NS when they come back to the network people on Maternity are a good example of this.
The below article pretty much confirms what i thought happens:
If this is for Symantec Management Platform 7.x, if an agent is still installed on the computer, when basic inventory checks in, the status of the computer will automatically change to Active. Note: In SQL, the computer's IsManaged field is set to 1 when its status is Active (managed). If the status is changed to Retired (no longer managed), IsManaged is set then to 0. This will revert back to 1 once the agent checks back in with inventory, however.
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO52993
I too don't have Asset Mangement installed on NS, what i do to check over retired devices is run this report below:
DECLARE @v1_TrusteeScope nvarchar(155)
SET @v1_TrusteeScope = N'{2E1F478A-4986-4223-9D1E-B5920A63AB41},{582029E2-FC5B-4717-8808-B80D6EF0FD67},{B760E9A9-E4DB-404C-A93F-AEA51754AA4F},{DDAB61D6-BDF8-43AB-9D6F-8AB6619F3363}'
SELECT
[vri2_Computer].[Guid] AS [_ItemGuid],
[vri2_Computer].[Name],
[ajs3_vFixedAssetResourceStatus].[Status]
FROM
[vRM_Computer_Item] AS [vri2_Computer]
LEFT OUTER JOIN [vFixedAssetResourceStatus] AS [ajs3_vFixedAssetResourceStatus]
ON ([vri2_Computer].[Guid] = [ajs3_vFixedAssetResourceStatus].[Guid])
WHERE
(
([vri2_Computer].[Guid] IN (SELECT [ResourceGuid] FROM [ScopeMembership] WHERE [ScopeCollectionGuid] IN (SELECT [ScopeCollectionGuid] FROM dbo.fnGetTrusteeScopeCollections(@v1_TrusteeScope))))
)
AND [ajs3_vFixedAssetResourceStatus].[Status] = 'Retired'
ORDER BY [vri2_Computer].[Name]
By default i think the status is just blank or null not active or retired, which isn't very helpful.
Hope this helps