The McAfee Boot Delay Start Service service hung on starting. Event ID: 7022

[Peacekeeper]

Selvan is online now  I will ping him.

[selvan]

Hi moldyjacket,

Sorry for the delay in getting here. With regards to the Support Experience the concerned agent was coached on this in order to arrest these errors in future.

I would like to Remote in to your PC (if you are OK) and collect a few information so that I can pass it on to the concerned. This will help us identify the root cause and progress.

Since you have Re-installed McAfee there is nothing much I could try. However getting to view the System Specs / Programs Installed / OS health will give an Idea.

With regards to the functionality of this Service - I have few Clarifications post which I will explain here.

[moldyjacket]

Thanks for following up and confirming I can use McAfee Support.

OK, I'm game. How do we schedule the data collection?

[moldyjacket]

From previous pages of posts and some comments that have been removed (I appreciate moderation enforcement), I’m concerned the nature of problem has become confused.

To refocus: the System error messages are not the problem; it was/is only the flag that caused me to look at the state of the service in the first place. The problem is the service never starts at all:

I suspect you’ll see the same thing on other XP test machines, even if running under emulation. If not, maybe emulation is masking it.

[moldyjacket]

Post to Self,

I’ve resisted explaining why I’m concerned about this when McAfee reports “Secured, no action required” since it may spark unnecessary panic and flood the thread. But I do feel the need to explain why it is important to investigate based on previous opinions:

AV protection is not a magic wand, it protects from known infections. There are many threats constantly evolving that take very active measures to hide from the AV. A service hanging that seems to be associated with initial boot scanning could be the only indication of an unidentified infection. There is only one thing worse than having an infection: having one and never knowing it.

[moldyjacket]

If I can’t get confirmation from McAfee Tech support they see it too and are working on it, the distinct possibility of an unidentified infection remains open to me.

[moldyjacket]

Ultimately, my protection is purely my responsibility.

Since I have not heard anything from McAfee Support regarding my SR and Selvan did not respond to my acceptance of his data collection offer (he’s been very active posting to others), I spent Easter weekend installing XP on another blank HD from trusted media (original XP install CD).

I installed no additional Windows components, only IE and applied all final updates. Then I installed only McAfee, the results: there is no McAfee Boot Delay service. I also noted the mfeapfk.sys Start registry value is automatically installed as 3 (not 2 as from previous reinstalls). I must conclude changes were made to the install package very recently. Today, I switched back to my original HD and applied McAfee updates then rebooted: The Boot Delay service is still present and hangs.

I plan to use my clean trusted HD as the new system and migrate to it, scanning this HD as a pure data disk and pick only needed data from it. But if I can’t get confirmation from McAfee that the Boot Delay service truly exists and is not an unidentified infection hiding itself, very soon I must begin the painful mitigation process of changing all passwords, financial information and etc.

[selvan]

Hi moldyjacket,

Please send me a Private message with your Convenient time and the Time Zone you belong to so that I can collect the logs. I presume that you have the same Contact number as in our Records.

Regards

[moldyjacket]

Thanks for responding, how about now? Yes, contact number is same as records.

[selvan]

I will be sending you a PM Please respond..!