Please look for the PM and we can set up something from there.
Thank you for your co-operation. Will setup a Session tomorrow to gather logs and will go from there.
Since you've been working this issue with Selvan and/or Tech Support, have you guys uncovered anything which might lead to a workaround or solution? I'm quite interested in the outcome as this problem is still happening to me. Thx.
Selvan had me collecting trace logs of what McAfee was doing when the internet stopped connecting because of McAfee Firewall. He just connected with me this evening and transferred the logs by gotoassist to his side. He said he will look over them and see what he can find, and then hopefully we have an answer. If not we will grab more trace logs. It is so odd, if it was either just FF or IE that would make sense but the Firewall shutting off all browsers is just so weird.
Peacekeeper,
There are no other protection software installed on these computers. The only protection that was installed for the last 5 years is McAfee Total Protection, and it was completely uninstalled (using MCPR) during the installation of LiveSafe and confirmed by McAfee tech support during our first support call.
During my troubleshooting, I completely uninstalled everything again, cleared everything with MCPR and installed again using all defaults on two computers. The problem is still present on both computers, occasionally (we see it about twice per day on each computer, but we obviously don't use computers all day!), but not at the same time. While one computer has the problem, the other can browse the web normally.
Second line of McAfee tech support called me to continue support. He recommended calling my ISP, suspecting a problem with my internet connection. Even if it totally did not match the symptoms, I did call them, they came and verified my internet service and everything is fine on the ISP side.
I did some additional troubleshooting steps that may be useful to others.
While internet access was not working, I opened a CMD prompt and executed "ping.exe google.com". Well, the program ping.exe did not even respond with the first line "Pinging google.com [24.200.237.89] with 32 bytes of data:". It was just waiting there at the command prompt. After about 10 minutes, internet started working again and the rest of the ping screen appeared, showing "Reply from ...." with time responses, and all were showing normal response time. It looks like the command "ping.exe" is not allowed to run until internet resumes. Is it blocked by the "On-Access Scanner"? I don't know.
I performed another type of test. I installed InternetConnectivityMonitor 1.41 and started logging the quality of my internet access, testing for google.com and bing.com every 30 seconds. The next time the internet access will be lost, it will capture it, right? Well guess what? It did not. There was a log event every 30 seconds while the internet access was working, then A GAP WITHOUT LOG EVENTS for about 10 minutes and when internet started working again, the next log event showed no problem. The only way to see the problem in the log is to scan the timestamps for a time span without log events.
I repeated the same test with a different monitoring tool (EasyNetMonitor) and I had the exact same behaviour: 10 minutes time gap without logged events and no error reported.
While internet does not work, even the internet connectivity test tools are being fooled.
While there is certainly a link with the McAfee Firewall (the problem always stops when I disable the firewall), there might also be a link with the McAfee On-Access Scanner (because the ping.exe program -and others- are not being launched when internet does not work.
"He recommended calling my ISP" ...good grief.. smh. If you have any other devices using your WiFi connection you will notice there is no problem with the actual internet connection.
Still also having the same exact issue as everyone else. Remedy for now is disable then immediately enable McAfee firewall and presto, But what a pain. Just out of curiosity, are you guys running a Dell computer with any of the Dell support programs running such as Dell Backup and Recovery or Dell SupportAssist?
At first I thought it was a problem with my ISP. They sent over someone, and they gave me a new router, replaced all the wires and put a new box on the house. I figured that might be the issue initially, I never thought it could be my McAfee. My Dell has the Dell Datasafe Local Backup on the computer but I do not use it.
Are all these PCs Dell? Haven't the time to sort through all the posts. Trying to sort out what goes ie what is common to your PCs and not on mine. Mine home built 17 12Gb ram nothing special installed.
Two Dell i7 desktop computers having the problem. One runs Windows 7 pre-installed by Dell, with some of their stuff still running (I never got the time to disable them all); the other computer runs a generic Windows 7 version (not Dell branded).
Strange that the generic version has issues I have 3 installs with no issues all home built. Hopefully Selvan finds what is the cause.
Btw thanks for the info
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