McAfee Total Protection wrecked my PC

[trentb]

I installed it on Thursday. Nothing else was installed since. I noticed some performance lags but considered them to be typical, that's what you get with anti-virus software. Which is why I usually don't install it, I just use Windows Security Essentials. But after getting an offer for a free year of McAfee, I figured I would try it.

I did some work Saturday night, left Exel, Firefox and RStudio running and when I came back to it on Sunday morning, I could log in but everything was frozen as "Not Responding." Nothing would work. I couldn't even open Task Manager. Microsoft has made Task Manager pretty robust, I've NEVER been unable to open it. But no amount of ctrl-alt-del would do anything.

What kind of hooks must McAfee have placed into the OS to prevent Task Manager from opening???

So I was forced to do a hard reboot and was offered to start in Safe Mode. Unfortunately, I selected "Start Windows Normally." Normally this would just work but it just ran and ran, visibly frozen.

So I hard reboot again and I get offered to repair Windows. Which I do, it's very slow and I wonder if it's working but it eventually offers to use a Restore point at which point I say yes. That completes, it reboots and.... has been booting for 20 30 40 minutes. The Start Windows logo is at least moving, it's not frozen like previously, but who knows if anything is happening.

WHY ON EARTH SHOULD THIS HAPPEN FROM INSTALLING MACAFEE???? This is worse than any virus I could have contracted.

This is a recently installed Windows 7 64-bit PC, all sp/updates have been applied. It was working perfectly before installing McAfee. And now it's bricked. I fear I'm going to have reinstall and I'm going to lose SIGNIFICANT work done in the past few days that is not backed up.

WHAT EXACTLY WAS MCAFEE PROTECTING ME FROM?

I could not be more furious. This is appalling. There is no reason why this should happen. This is not a function of me leaving programs open, any state of my PC or anything else I did. (Because in the end, we're talking about a pretty clean PC.) And this is not illusory correlation, nothing else occurred with the computer that would have caused this to happen. Nothing else was installed, no devices are attached, the usage of the PC has been pretty plain jane ordinary. I rarely even turn it off.

This is a function of your poorly designed software that destroyed a computer. It is malware at its finest.

Any now I'm stuck wasting my Sunday trying to get it sorted out.

What exactly would McAfee like to offer to reimburse me for my trouble? Anything? I doubt it...

[exbrit]

Obviously something was clashing horribly with the software or the machine doesn't meet the minimum requirements of the software, you haven't given details so I can't really hazard a guess.

I assure you that is far from being normal.  Did you completely remove Windows Security Essentials before attempting this?

If this had happened here I would have rebooted into Safe Mode and started a System Restore to before it happened.  Is that option not possible?

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