McAfee now hoses Vista

This is unfreakinbelievable!!!

So my wife gets a call from a friend who was gone for the whole week. She turned on her PC and 10 mins later she couldn't connect to the internet and IE was "hanging up". She runs Vista

I went over and saw there was a connection, but nothing was being allowed to pass. I went to check the McAfee firewall..and there it was:

MCAFEE DISPLAYING THE SAME 2/3 OF A SCREEN FOR MCAFEE "SECURITY CENTER".

The exact same thing it did to mine when I got an "update" and hosed itself along with some of my system.

Checking the logs, I found that 5 minutes after she had turned on the PC, McAfee had installed a "update" to the firewall/network drivers. And once again, McAfee did a thorough job, even a system restore didn't fix the problem (same thing happened on mine)

I had to go to services and shut every McAfee driver/program off. Then I had to repair the damage to IE that it's "update" did (it changed some of the files for some reason). I still have to go back & do a scan to see what other files are damaged.

(When McAfee hosed my system it corrupted some of the printer sharing files (among others))

Seriously folks...why is this company even allowed to exist? All I can say is Intel has it's work cut out for it!

So it's really the McAfee suite (which I despise). I wouldn't run it if you paid me. We do run just the anti-virus program on university servers without problem (university license). Having said that, it's not on any of my computers.

Lemur, our college has been plagued by the Hamweq and some other virus/worm for 2 semesters now. Guess what they are using as an AV?

I'm glad you've had luck with it at your university....I'd be wary though

Every time I get home & plug in my FD, MSE pops up immediately and tells me I have one or the other on it. Why they continue to use such an inferior product is beyond me, save for the exception they must have gotten it really cheap...obviously for a reason.

If you'd like to see how much "Fun" I had with this product, here is the thread right before I got rid of it

http://www.sevenforums.com/system-security/103003-mcafee-update-8-9-10-causes-win-7-problems.html

Can't get any cheaper than free. MSE, Forefront, AVG, Avast ... I 'd use all these before McAfee.

I wouldn't even recommend running any part of McAde2Fail on anything period! You'll find a few lengthy discussions anywhere you look on how this one software manages to cause more headaches then the viruses and malwares it's supposed to protect against?!

Every so often every program will have the occasional bad update or bad install of an update while that's one program with a unique track record for a "guaranteed fail"! The advice everyone will be giving you would be to see that dumped and finding something else that does work.

Night Hawk said:

I wouldn't even recommend running any part of McAde2Fail on anything period! You'll find a few lengthy discussions anywhere you look on how this one software manages to cause more headaches then the viruses and malwares it's supposed to protect against?!

Every so often every program will have the occasional bad update or bad install of an update while that's one program with a unique track record for a "guaranteed fail"! The advice everyone will be giving you would be to see that dumped and finding something else that does work.

Click to expand...

Yepperz...very true

Back in the 95 days that was the first av program I bought retail in a store one day and "never went back"! It was crapware then and still is. All you can do with the other Vista system is find every trace of it there and sent it on it's way!

If that party still wants a retail program found far more effective, reliable but not even noticable download the 30 day trial of VIPRE Premium. That has everything rolled into one package for web filtering as well as a firewall, antivirus, antiadware, antispyware, antirootkit protections and won't even noticed running in the background.

It has a very super light footprint as well not being a load of bloatware. I've had this one now for the last six months and would say this one replaces a good 90% of the others right off the top.

Any bad sites it detects even with adwares is blocked out completely upon detection. Each site blocked was later checked out while booted from a live cd and found there was a reason why the sites were blocked!

There's no free version however. Someone I know who runs security checks on web sites hounded me for months to take a look at it. Once the new build was in the works I decided something more then another freebie would be a thought.

Oh McAfee, is there anything you won't hose? But I'll say this much, it could be worse, they could be running Sophos.

I never even looked at that one. But from everything heard over the years since first looking at the guaranteed McAFail I couldn't imagine it getting any worse!

I could imagine if we started a poll on the absolute worst av softwares it wouldn't too be hard to preguess which ones would be the semi-finalists as well top contenders for sure!

Darician said:

Oh McAfee, is there anything you won't hose? But I'll say this much, it could be worse, they could be running Sophos.

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Or Trend Micro . They still used the Microsoft DDK samples as the basis for their kernel drivers until a version or so ago - seriously, that's so crazy it couldn't even be made up. I just about laughed myself empty when I saw the pool tag was " DDK".

Anymore, it seems like the updates going out from McAfee are hosing all these computers out there for consumers. This past summer, the one school I attend recently upgraded their machines from Vista to 7. Now, when we went back to school, the computers weren't quite ready. After a week went by, they were finally ready to be used. After I turned on and logged into the machine, I discovered that all the 30 computers that were in the room running 7 had no protection! Because of this mass email worm floating around now in the wild, they could very well get it if they aren't careful and infect their entire network of users. I make sure that when I bring my USB drive home that I thoroughly scan it with Norton before I take anything off of it. I am pretty sure that Windows 7 can get viruses so why they don't have any protection on their machines beats me.
Unbelievable!

I think it's probably like Night Hawk mentioned in a earlier post on another thread, they get big discounts and instead of paying up, they use whatever is the best price (Well, we all want to save a buck, don't we?)

Night Hawk had an idea....

I could imagine if we started a poll on the absolute worst av softwares it wouldn't too be hard to preguess which ones would be the semi-finalists as well top contenders for sure!

Click to expand...

There's an idea, lets set up a poll & see what the WORST rated AV is.

(I'm already placing bets on who's gonna win that one):roflmao:

Borg 386 said:

I think it's probably like Night Hawk mentioned in a earlier post on another thread, they get big discounts and instead of paying up, they use whatever is the best price (Well, we all want to save a buck, don't we?)

Night Hawk had an idea....

I could imagine if we started a poll on the absolute worst av softwares it wouldn't too be hard to preguess which ones would be the semi-finalists as well top contenders for sure!

Click to expand...

There's an idea, lets set up a poll & see what the WORST rated AV is.

(I'm already placing bets on who's gonna win that one):roflmao:

Click to expand...

Why not? McA(de-to)F(ail-4-a-f)ee would be a "classic" without a doubt! :roflmao:

What this all comes down to is seeing a few of these programs being poorly written and far from having updated standards. I would certainly give Trend Micro and a newer version Norton a leading edge over McA(guaranteed to)Fail and Sophos while favoring a few others.

One thing I found with the premium version of the av program here was not only a firewall but additional web related protections rather then the need for any second internet security program or addon toolbar for IE as seen when running AVG. When you have nothing the security bar there can help while still not a better solution.

Here's a look at the firewall settings for the one on now.

Norton and Kaspersky are my 2 favorites.

I don't use Norton mcafee Kaspersky Only Webroot spysweeper with antivirus !

Some managers also go with what they know or can get mass discount. In the last two places I worked at, we went with Symantec Endpoint Security mostly for the management and ease of getting it into systems, however, where I am working at right now, dealing with the drawback of SEPM, which is overhead on older systems that aren't really up to 'snuff' hardware wise and causing work impact.

I have never really been a fan of McAfee, and even less so after spending 3 days wondering why I couldn't get one program to work properly, only to find out that due to the lack of proper uninstalling of the application, it left redirections to their dlls that are no longer there in the registry that caused all sorts of problems until I used their software installer, which shouldn't be a requirement on proper installation installers.

Actually it's more often registry entires seeing drivers loaded without the program being present. That's typical of an incomplete uninstall where leftover entries require a cleanup tool from the software company itself.

Drivers found missing on the other hand shows a bad install to start with where things simply weren't unpacked and installed fully by the installer. Unfortunately that's the reality will all softwares including the Windows installer. The user(who ever serviced the machine) would be at fault for not performing a repair if the option is seen with the installer or another full install.

The main problem with McA(ssured)Failure is not getting the proper support to start with. The software simply hasn't progressed any after all these years with even the newerr versions being written like crap! with the same seen for the updates rather then upgrading the software standards to come out with a working program!

But as they say $$$$$$$$ talks and crud walks!

As for Webroot Spysweeper that is another story when the shareware downloads shows all these bugs but you must buy the full version in order to see them cleaned off? BUNK! That's the typical sales gimic for the guilable seen with several programs. No thanks!

Nearly every web provider in the UK gives McAfee out free to their costumers. It was offered to me by BT, Sky and Virgin. I feel sorry for people who aren't technically minded and install it just because it's there.

The ISPs are getting cut rate bargains apparently. That's what was seen with a few here as well having the trial version available when first signing up with a new ISP for example and they include a trial version cd.

To avoid that several I know simply grab the free versions of other av programs with AVG being the most popular. Others are simply too lazy and then wonder why their machines are running as they should be until a bug sweep is performed and loads of them are found!

Guess who gets asked to bail them out? Don't answer that one since you already know!

However, if some ISP's are charging their users to use the software, the ISP has to be paying the AV company which would mean that if not a lot of users use the software because they know its history, then the ISP wouldn't have enough money to pay and would have to either switch or think of something quick!

That's my perspective of it anyways.