Auto update to Security Center 2010 kills Windows 7 search

[JoeSchmoe]

Having the same problem as others here with my Windows Search function being disabled.

Has anybody from McAfee acknowledged this problem officially, or provided information on when we can expect a fix?

Joe

[Peacekeeper]

I mentioned they acknowledged at top of this page. No update yet but will ask for an update in our next phone call Monday

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 30/07/10 6:52:36 AM

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 30/07/10 8:58:48 AM

[mcafeeuserwin7]

Peacekeeper wrote:
I mentioned they acknowledgedat top of this page. No update yet but will ask for an update in our next phone call Monday
Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 30/07/10 6:52:36 AM

Thanks for the update.  Turning off Windows Search is only half a solution: not only does it make searching slow, but it means mail is not searched (unless you search mail separately - and slowly).  I've come to rely on Windows Search since WDS v2.6 on Windows XP.  I'm wondering whether to uninstall McAfee and use AVG plus Windows firewall until this is fixed.

PS - we have McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7.0i on our work machines, and that doesn't have the problem.

Edited 31st July: I've removed McAfee for now (using AVG / Windows Firewall) until this is fixed.  I'm not criticising McAffee, as I think this was identified only a few weeks ago.

Message was edited by: mcafeeuserwin7 on 31/07/10 12:44:56 CDT

[pacificmike]

I have spent four and half months trying to figure out what this problem was because your programmers did not take the time to put a jump address on a fail, to an error routine in your threads that affect mcafee and security on the windows 7 files and folders.  I could not imagine that a security program wud affect the search feature of an os in such a dramatic way without even a burp of where to begin to troubleshoot it.

I rebuilt my new computer twice.  i replaced my new computer and rebuilt it twice again. I turned my auto update off and it still did the updates.  everytime I thought I had the problem fixed and then looked a the updates thats says "updates for windows security" only and i did not connect it to mcafee but to windows security and caused it fail again.  I only started to look at updates recemtly when I went to bed after the last rebuild and the problem was resolved and wake up in the morning and it was failing again w/o any interaction from me and the message wud say updates was installed and your computer was restarted.  How could a security update cause a serious failure as this.  Wasnt that the reason for the security sw to ensure this didnt happen?   I contacted hp tech support and paid for a service ticket to MS all the way to the R and D support team and after almost five months both HP and MS gave up.  It reminds me of the story of the Trojan Horse.  You welcome the enemy in by being duped that they were there to respect you and you are now safe.

If I didnt have a background in computers, there would have been no way for me to resolve this problem because it is intermittent and spurious and the anomoly of the search results changes all the time.  No one can track down an issue like this if the you cannot duplicate the same type of results when it changes all the time. I should have thought bigger like a company with your reputation would cause an anomoly like this to happen.   I have seen every type of results that you can imagine; works in C drive on user files, but doenst work when in the user directory or user profile folder on user files; works on some subfolders but not others; works on only recently modified files;  works on the full directory path but not from the stupid libraries that W7 introduced; works only on Outlook emails and finally the search engine does not even run and all you get is "no files found".  I have worked non stop for the last five weeks and ignored my work to try and resolve this problem.  Spending hours and hours waiting on the phone for some techie that had a two week course (if that) on how to handle technical support calls for a product they never used and dont know what someone uses it for.  Havine so many remote logins from the ms and hp tech support that I have lost track how many times they logged in remotely and tried to find the problem.

You cannot believe how incensed i am at mcafee right now,,,,,no..mucafee!.  After four blessed days after my last rebuild and leaving mucaffe out this time out of nearly 150 days of failures with mucafee installed or turned off, I called your tech support today and asked them "is there a known problem with windows 7 search feature and mcafee" and he said in an accent that I had to keep making him repeat "there is nothing in their database" and wanted me to install the security suite and intentionally break my os again so he could try and troubleshoot it.  I asked him what his level of expertise was that he could solve this problem while every techno nerd I have talked to could not.  Is he crazy?  dont you give them access to test labs that have various configuratons on them or do you only do that for Enterprise customers now?  Where do you get these people from, the back streets of New Delhi?  I have gone through 2 computers and five rebuilds before i narrowed it down as a mucafee issue by not installing the security suite.  Turning it off did no good.  Stopping the serch servoce only change the results but did not resolve the problem.  I tried almost every dos command i cud think of, but i didnt try the Attribute modification on the entire volume probably because MS and I had tried so many things that we all lost faith after so long and so many kinds of troubleshooting.

I know, you are going to say well if you are so hot how come it took you so long.  Well, sorry guys I manage my own business now and never had to learn about the internals of how security software worked.  I am a hardware and os man. unix primarily and adequate in windows.  if I this was a unix or xenix, then I could have written a shell routine to try and trap the issue.  i have a BS in computers from 1986 and worked for MS, HP and Silicon Graphics as a support engineer for thirteen years.  And, I dont have the code or ability to test on these off the shelf proprietory systems.  What surprises me is that this problem, while being intermittent but constant has not been raised until now.  What can I possibly have configured into my environment to make this problem so persistent and obvious on a brand new system with a brand new os that only has Office 2007 installed on it?  Sure, i copied my personal files off of my Vista.  All 4573 of them.  That shouldnt be a problem, or is it?  In other words, did u test this product properly before releasing it, or did u bow down to the almight dollar?  I have seen many problems that were introduced to an os that the programmers did not expect the product to be used in that way, but that was many years ago and it has been a long time since I ran in to an issue like this that an optional sw designed for the system that broke the os so bad and was put out on the market.

I am so upset that if a representative of mucafee walked onto my yard right now, I would sic my dog on them and he only weighs 35 pounds.

I cannot wait to call Micosoft r and d and tell them what the problem is.  Your name is going to be mud in their techno arena. In the meantime i wish i could sue you for the 100s of hours of wasted time you owe me.  I will settle for a full refund for the 2010, which i had to buy cuz my 2008 version wudnt install on windows 7 and you didnt provide an upgrade last March.  Instead you put the upgrade in a new version and charged people for it.  Capitlist Pigs!

Yes, and I am angry with myself too, cuz when I find a problem, i dont let go until i have a resolution.  I would have gladly turned it over to someone who had access to the build code if I could have found out who was responsible for the problem.  I finally narrowed it down to permissions and sharing on the windows 7 and something that was causing it to fail with all kinds of caveats. No os code could be that unstable.  I had troubleshooted and configured and removed and stopped and started the service until I became an expert on W7 indexing and file sharing and permissions and never a teeny little beep from either windows 7 or mucafee.  I will never use an uppercase m on your name mcafee again.  It will be a cold day in hell before i use your product again that i  have used for 8 years.  What the heck is wrong with you people, puttting a half baked product out?  just to keep up with the market?  if it aint baked, then dont take it out of the oven.  I made a damn good living off of taking the design programmers code and fixing their problems because they got in a hurry and didnt test their own slice of code and how it ineracted with the entire product.  They would just check it into the build and leave someone else to solve their problems and never even try to use their own product as a user would.  You leave that to test and technical support to use your code and products that if you dont design the right test in it, it never finds the problem.  You dont have to face the customers that you affect.  If I ran my business they way you guys build products, I would lose all of my customers.

i saw the replies from the internal mcafee people on this thread and I am glad that you at least admit that you have a problem, now go fix it and get me my hot fix, NOW!  Or i will spread this through every techno blog on the internet and call Comcast technical support too.  it is not just the auto update, cuz i never let any sw update w/o knowing wat it is in case i have problems.  i believe it has to do with your interaction with the indexing and how windows 7 changes their sharing and how you control access to files and folders to check the security of it.  In other words you have the final say on how the files and folders on the os interact with the user.  That is a heavy ressponsibility and you should treated that way. That is the best i can do w/o your source code cuz as i said the failure takes on different aspects constantly as you modify and reconfigure and restart.  At times, it even slowed my system and internet to a crawl after i wud restart.

You look at that code. IMO the problem is more insidious than just an autoupdate feature unless it is the update sw that is introducing the problem.  In that case, you need to look at the build code for the changes you are making and add some damn traps in the routines that points to the new code.  Your 90 day life cycle code should never be allowed to impact an os in this way without giving you a clue to hang on.  No, i did not try any mucaffee technical fixits, cus I am aghast that this is who is culpable for this, for me dramatic issue.  Perhaps my problem was more drastic than the other users that replied to this thread cuz this was a show stopper for someone who has years of files on their computers and rely heavily on being able to pull up files quickly and use them in my applications or programs.  I normally use the search feature as much as 40 to 50 times in a day and it failed every day.  Perhaps i am the only one who caught the full brunt of this issue, so dont expect me to be gentile about bloggin about it cuz i had no workaround until i removed your product.

.

When I calm down after writing this reply to the thread i just found and viewed, I will call muckafee and explain to your technical support team about the thread so that they can explain it to their customers that yes they know about it and they can expect to pay through the nose for the next version that will include the fix, or use the site to search for known problems or problems that others are having similar to problems as theirs.  they will probably hang up on me as techie's have a habit of doing recently if they dont understand english enough to understand the problem or dont know how to help you, or transfer you unitl the phone system times out and I go back to the main menu and have to start all over again.   i am disgusted with the whole damn computer industry right now and how they support their products and their customers.  In my day, you didnt get on the phone unless you had a degree or equivalent experience.

Customers need to start demanding better support from these companies that have such a huge effect on our daily lives and  becoming rich and demand to speak with people who speak english as a first language and grew up in a technical world like in America, rather than people who grow up in third world countries and probably never turned a computer on before being trained. Cant you teach them phonetics as well?

The only good thing about this is my ISP provider came out today and tweaked my wireless and the connection to the internet to perfection, something I have been trying to get them to do for a year.

Sorry for blowing off, but this reply is not meant for consumers.  this is for the mucafee techno nerds who monitor these threads in their spare time and the internal people at mucafee.  Thanks guys but something stinks in your company and you better get a handle on it.  How about sharing with your support techies that a problem has appeared and may need a fix at the same time u find out?  How about instructing them on how to search consumer blogs?  Why do all you programmers wait until everybody else knows before letting the tech support people in on it.  I have never written a single routine no matter how small that did not do have a trap test in it for a failure and provide a jump address to the error routine, even if it is just a unknown error message with a return address to the code that sent it?  You can always remove it later and It will save you and your depleting clients list a lot of time and money.

dont be so reliant upon your own experience and abilities that you dont test your own code.  I even had some unexpected exception error messages and had to cold boot, but i cant blame that all on you.  These products are coming off the assembly line without being absolutely sure that it is a good product.

We contol the money and we need to expect more from these companies, especially the sw companies.

God punishes the wicked and sometime misses and punishes the innocent as well.

PacifcMike

Message was edited by: pacificmike on 8/4/10 12:56:06 AM CDT

Message was edited by: pacificmike on 8/4/10 1:57:53 AM CDT

Message was edited by: pacificmike on 8/4/10 2:07:29 AM CDT

Message was edited by: pacificmike on 8/4/10 2:16:29 AM CDT

[edu001]

Bravo!!!

[pacificmike]

thanks edu001.  I may not have made any difference but maybe it got them to think a little bit.

[pacificmike]

Just one more think if I may. Why dont you put some tags on this site and thread so that when you search the internet for keywords such as "windows 7 search fails updates" or just publish the blog on the internet.  i may have found this problem in the beginning if you had some proper tags on it.

PacificMike

[pacificmike]

Thanks for the research.  The thread that you are referring to on the MS forum was about non indexed files such as images and other non texted files, If i understood it correctly.  my only solution was to remove mucaffe entirely.  Turning off didnt work.  controlling the updates didnt work either. Indexing is a little quirky but it works fine without mucafee.  total annihalation of mucafee from your life will solve your problem.  I promise!  I did learn that you could still make and run batch files in dos, but it think they have seriously limited the amount of commands in the dos window.  Ignore the message that "rebuild is complete" and give it some time.  You will know in other ways if indexing is working properly.

Just one more thing.  He did say they were files copied over from an older verson or computer, which i believe is at the heart of this issue for me as I have nothing but Office 2007 and the nearly 8 gigabytes of files that I copied over from my vista system, which is 64 bit too, but I think it handles 64 bit files as 32 bit files in vista or that you can turn it off so that it does, due to problems that vista had with some types of 64 bit files, they allow you to do that. I havent used my vista system for months.  Too focused on this problem.

PM

Message was edited by: pacificmike on 8/4/10 3:21:57 AM CDT

Message was edited by: pacificmike on 8/4/10 3:30:36 AM CDT

[pacificmike]

perhaps you might want to refer them to my recent reply today as I think i have some things, if you can get over my attitude that might be helful, particularly the constant variations of the anomoly and how it responses in so many different ways.  Each blog and thread that I have looked at, I have run into the same identical issues while i was troubleshooting it with MS r and d support.  Judging by the different variations of how the search feature responds when it fails leads me to believe that what is causing this frrom mucafee, is extremely unpredictable as to what you will get.

Kinda like Halloween, a trick or treat every time you use search and a little horror mixed in.

thanks for the ideas,

PM

NOTE:  Called MS tech support and gave them the urll thead address and the one linked to mikekirby and they are extremely happy to hear from me and that the will ensure that this information gets out to there customers.  That is how tech support is suppose to work.  time before connected to tech support person: 4 minutes.  Will now call HP and begin advertisig this issue on as many tech blogs i can find providing the url for this thread until mucafee admits they have a problem.

Message was edited by: pacificmike on 8/4/10 7:21:32 PM CDT

Message was edited by: pacificmike on 8/4/10 7:24:52 PM CDT

[pacificmike]

Item B makes some sense to me and why it wont let you even view them.  if that is the case then it has no rhyme or reason as to the way it decides which file is a threat and when. some files wud show up one time and not the next.  I had three word files that all had the keyword in their names and in one period of TS, it wud only find one file when they all existed in the same subfolder.

Extremely unstable routine and it may actually cause W7 to add to the problem with its new indexing and new sharing features.

PM

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