I have been watching this thread because I am having similar problems. First off let me say I really appreciate the time you volunteers spend, as well as the effort, to try and fix Mcafee's messy issues.
That being said, I have to say I was originally having the dat file is between 8 and 29 days old error, then another post mentioned a few possible fixes. The first one being to rename the DAT folder to DATold. This completely honked up my Mcafee services to they wouldn't even start. I had to rename the folder back to get it somewhat functional again.
The next try was with the McsubDB.dat and ,bak files. I zapped them and now I get the please verify your subscription error, and when I click to reverify, it immediately says it was unable to verify my subscription. Now unless they have a cray supercomputer running the verification routines, I know it should take at least a few seconds to complete. But it isn't even trying to go out and verify the subscription.
So now I have a completely non-functional antivirus package which I paid a LOT of money for. Mcafee can't even be bothered to have some of their technicians deal with the public. They have to get volunteers to do it for them. I am guessing however that Mcafee probably tells the volunteers very little. They just want to be insulated from the cheesed off users who got ripped off by this buggy pile of 1s and 0s.
I switched back to Mcafee after a 4 year journey to heck with Noprton. The only company who's customer support is worse than the techs at Mcafee. And probably it seems, the only company who cares less about their product.
Mcafee blows a lot of hot wind and platitudes to keep their customers happy when in reality, if not for the volunteers, they would have no reasonable tech support at all.
As for my current issue.. It is making me rethink Mcafee. This is a critical piece of system software. You pay a lot for it. you should NOT have to jump through these hoops to get it to work correctly. It should NOT spontaneously and randomly self destruct, as it seems to like doing. And it most certainly should not just stop working for no reason at all.
I hate wasting time in chat when I have better things to do than be fixing more Mcafee headaches. From watching the forums, I have noticed that most of these very serious and common issues have been around for months, if not years. And Mcafee, true to form, has not even acknowledged them, let alone come up with PERMANENT solutions to them.
Yay for the Volunteers.!!!
Boo for McAfee support....
I'm off to deal with a tech chat drone now... Wish me luck.