Mcshield.exe High Virtual Memory Usage

[coxdavi]

Yes, I am happy to see that you are one of the people still trying to get to the bottom of this issue.

One thing I mentioned is that Tier 2 had hoped to go through a 2-phase approach to taking a look at what was going on in my case.  It was to collect McAfee logs and second was to set up a Debug Diagnosis collection concentrating on the mcshield.exe task, but this second piece was never able to be set up and collected.  That might be something to check into.

Have you or your colleagues done anything with Event Viewer ?  If so, anything positive ?

This second occurrence in 2011 began for me in the few first days of June.  I was wondering about updates that were issued in the first few days of June, and if anyone had ever taken time to go back there to see what the updates were being applied to as far as which pieces, modules, parts of Total Protection were being updated?

Last for tonight:  While I am ecstatic that my PC is very well-tuned at this time, that is no guarantee that I am never again going to have issues with mcshield or other parts of Total Protection.  I would also like to get to the bottom of this thing.  Let me know if you need any help that I can give you.    

Dave

[Peacekeeper]

The mer logs include event viewer logs will ask . Somer is on our monday call as well.

[coxdavi]

Give Somer my regards tomorrow.  I am currently downloading Total Protection for the 3rd time.  Hopefully, it will stick this time.  I had to uninstall MBAM before doing the uninstall, removal tool and new install.  Other packages aren't threatened by the existence of Malwarebytes.  Why McAfee Total Protection?  I just use MBAM as a scanning tool.  Silly stuff.     

[Peacekeeper]

It clashes with real time scanners ie MWAB pro paid version and does not differentiate between versions. Easy to do tho as MWAB installs fast.

[Peacekeeper]

Mate they ask can you provide the following

VMware version

OS version and service pak XP sp3

Ram

cpu

Mcafee versions

Anything else that comes to mind

[islandgirl]

hello coxdavi and all -

funnily enough just now I was sitting quietly reading your posts and all of a sudden my hard drive staerts spinning like mad and lo - mcshield.exe has shot up to 217,000. Then drops back down to 68,000 or so.

Don't ask me why. I will ask YOU why!  And you will give me any number of explanations -to which I  say THIS SHOULDN"T HAPPEN..

. 

I'm kind of weary of all this... i aso get Mcsvhost crashing regularly with and error message saying it has had to shut down.

[Peacekeeper]

Gees you lot are unlucly none of my installs are causing any issues at all. At least no mcsvhost or mcshield issues. Something must be differemnt in installed software or hardware.

PM inbox full so cannot PM you.

Is your Mcsvhost same issue as

https://community.mcafee.com/message/232052#232052

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 13/03/12 1:05:16 PM

[thecreator]

islandgirl wrote:
hello coxdavi and all - 
funnily enough just now I was sitting quietly reading your posts and all of a sudden my hard drive staerts spinning like mad and lo - mcshield.exe has shot up to 217,000. Then drops back down to 68,000 or so.
Don't ask me why. I will ask YOU why!  And you will give me any number of explanations -to which I  say THIS SHOULDN"T HAPPEN..
.  
I'm kind of weary of all this... i aso get Mcsvhost crashing regularly with and error message saying it has had to shut down. 

Hi islandgirl,

You posted a lot, but reading this post without your version of McAfee installed or your operating system information. Mcshield can't be disabled at all. And even with Real-Time Scanning set to Never.

So, if you ever really need to disable the Anti-Virus portion to install another program, where it saids specifically to disable your Anti-Virus, you must uninstall McAfee completely.

     This is a Clean Boot Mode and McAfee is still running in all its glory. Saving you time in the future, until they fixed the problem.

[coxdavi]

Hello again Islandgirl,

     Sorry to hear you are still having problems.  As you can see from what Tony has said, he is still pulling his hair out over the mcshield issue.  It's a sad thing that this has been going on a long time now this time.  I relate to the weariness you describe, which is why I said to Somer and Tier 2 that it was time for me to take a break from all this nonsense.  Turned out to be three months where I was able to get my PC back into good shape, but you can see what I had to do to get there.  Eliminate the mess one thing at a time ( including hardware issues ), until it was VMWare being totally uninstalled from my PC that did the trick.  Now, I am browsing. emailing and doing work on document creation without being swapped out ( frozen or hanging ).  What that cleanup did  was to take all of that out of the equation, so if I were to encounter another issue with mcshield or mcagent ( it was more shield ), it would be the old idea of what you are left with being a problem, more than likely.  Also, I was away from the use of McAfee for that three months as I didn't want Total Protection in the picture at all as I went through the cleanup.  Most of that time, I was on Norton, which was fine, along with Kaspersky and Microsoft Security Essentials for short times as I used their scanning software as requested.  Now that my PC has been deemed clean, I decided to come back to McAfee, and I have been successfully running under it for the last day.  It is working fine since I removed Malwarebytes from my PC.  Currently, I am monitoring through Task Manager, and everything looks fine.  Part of the hardware tuning was to increase my RAM from 512M to just under 2 Gig, so that helps a lot.  It was a lot of time well-spent to get my PC tuned up and running as it used to before it was getting all tied up.  In the time from the beinning of June, 2011 up to mid-December, when I stepped away, I had a lot of interaction with Tier 2.  And, even let them remotely get on my PC which i never allow.  But, I was so sick of all this that I decided to let them retrieve logs, which they were able to do.  The second part that they were supposed to do was the setup and log collection using Debug Diagnosis, but they could not get it to work on mcshield.  That is something I may ask Tony about as far as setting that up on a couple of users' PCs and collecting that diagnostic data.  It may help trap the actual problem.  I would think seeing that this is the second occurrence of this issue in 2.5 years, that McAfee would get behind trying to capture that diagnostic data.  Wasn't the start of your issue ( this time - not 2010 ) around the end of May 2011 as well?

[Hayton]

Sudden disk activity .... mcshield (memory, or Virtual Memory?) spikes .... sounds like it's swapping out to disk. High VM means less in-memory use but more swapping in and out, so more disk activity and large numbers of Page Faults.

btw the techs are investigating this, and feedback suggests they're making some progress in understanding why the reported mcshield problems, while not universal, are pretty common. It might also have some bearing on the other problem with McSvHost, but I wouldn't bet on it at this stage. If they can work out how to reduce the mcshield activity I for one (who see it on my XP box) will accept less-than-perfect as being good enough.