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Peacekeeper
Message 111 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Yes the floppy thrashing issue is I feel as does McAfee a different issue to the slow down. Mcafee is asking some users to allow logs to be taken of their PCs to ascertain what is happening. My 2 PCs do/did not exhibit the slow down issue. Customer_is_always_right has some interesting suggestions for the cause and these should be looked at. This now is in Doug's and the techs hands so best wait for them to see what they say.

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 17/04/14 7:57:52 PM
Graffin75
Former Member
Message 112 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

I for one appreciate the efforts you moderators are going to, to get this and other issues resolved.

All Anti-Virus/Security Software will cause a little bit of a slow-down, even on the latest of PC's.

We shouldn't be complaining too much that McAfee is grinding our floppy drives or hogging resources on Windows XP. Sure, it's an inconvenience, but it's better than them ceasing support for XP.

The floppy issue is nothing. Disable it in device manager. How often does one use a floppy drive these days?

I've been using Total Protection for over 6 years and it has had its fair share of bugs and problems. Despite ONLY installing the Virus Scan, Anti-Spam and Personal Firewall, the time it takes for the McAfee shield in the system tray to become "solid" is simply unacceptable. This isn't just on Windows XP, but also on a year old Windows 7 laptop with fairly high specs.

During the time it takes for the shield to display properly, everything else is painfully slow.

Another issue is with some updates seemingly not completing. When that happens, i'm unable to browse the internet, and forced to do a hard reset of my PC/laptop, then try updating McAfee again once it restarts and the update goes on and completes without a hitch. If I try cancelling a problematic update, eventually (like 5-10 minutes later) I get a dialog box say nsAppShell.dll or something similar has crashed. Again, this is not isolated to Windows XP alone. It does it on Windows 7 Professional as well. The only other program I actively use whilst the update is happening in the background is Firefox (latest version), so that could be the cause, but I doubt it.

McAfee's always had its quirks, but i've tried other packages (eg. Norton/Symantec, TrendMicro, AVG, BitDefender, etc.) and they resulted in other issues (and infections)... so i've gone back to the tried and tested McAfee. I will also say that i've always received excellent customer service from the McAfee call centers and the mods on here, so that's why i'm patient enough to wait for these "bugs" to be ironed out.

Please keep us posted as to when the floppy fix goes through so I/we can re-enable our floppy drives again.

Cheers!

Message was edited by: Graffin75 on 4/17/14 4:49:00 AM CDT
Peacekeeper
Message 113 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Graffin75

1 thing to remember is if you have indexing set to all c drive there is  a big delay on lower speed cpu powered PCs as Mcshield checks the files as the does the index checking. Removing indexing or limiting it to certain folders helps.

Not saying this the be all fix but it can help.

Re the issues you mentioned sometimes a clean reinstall helps other times it is a bug and needs fixing.

milstone
Contributor
Message 114 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

mjminer -

Thanks for the warning re running without AV protection, but I have no choice but to disable the vulnerability scanner. This is because the other bug that appeared at the same time as the floppy banger, namely, the CPU use going to 99% on Firefox, also requires that the McAfee vulnerability scanner be disabled. When I disabled the floppy drive in device manager it did nothing for the CPU overload. Fortunately, I am behind a NAT router and SiteAdvisor is working, as is the full system scanner, so my systems are not unprotected.

Dougr -

Thanks a bunch for your response! I'm looking forward to a patch announcement.

Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 115 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

@everyone,

I'm out of hospital and back on the case. Many thanks for all your good wishes, and while it wasn't exactly a fun time at least it went okay.

So now we have a new and irksome little bug, which may require a thread all to itself. This one I have noticed several times, the most recent being (um, yesterday? Very recent, anyway).

Another issue is with some updates seemingly not completing. When that happens, i'm unable to browse the internet, and forced to do a hard reset of my PC/laptop, then try updating McAfee again once it restarts and the update goes on and completes without a hitch.

@Graffin75 : well spotted, and you've provided some information I didn't have -

If I try cancelling a problematic update, eventually (like 5-10 minutes later) I get a dialog box say nsAppShell.dll or something similar has crashed.

Next time it happens can you make a note of that file name? "nsAppShell.dll" is certainly a Mozilla (Firefox) file, but the name occurs too often in other contexts to be sure that it's restricted to Mozilla.

The symptoms are that the update fails to complete (waiting for something?) and the Security Center cannot then be opened. Internet access from any browser is not possible, although it is still possible to send and receive email using an email client, and to send network queries from a command window. The implication then is that the firewall has gone into lockdown, preventing the browser from functioning.

As I said, this is a different topic from the one previously being discussed. Any votes for splitting it off into a new thread?

Message was edited by: Hayton on 19/04/14 03:37:45 IST
Peacekeeper
Message 116 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Ask on monday mod call and yes I would say it is different Is this on XP as well?

Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 117 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

I saw it only on XP, Graffin75 saw it on both XP and Windows 7.

catdaddy
MVP
MVP
Message 118 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Welcome back Hayton, Glad that all went well....

I cannot specifically say that I have experienced an issue with Updates failing to complete. At least in regards to it throwing up a Error message, and requiring a restart. I have noticed on occasion (Seldom) that upon bringing my monitor out of "Idle".

A McAfee Alert Prompt displaying it had just installed updates. I say this for the majority of times, it is the case that I never see the prompt. And by checking my "About" in my MSC, it indeed shows that my Auto-update indeed had occured.

Getting back to the prompt display, out of curosity I once opened my Task Manager to check my processes, at which time upon movement of my mouse, it seems. The prompt closed and the update completed. It was as if there was a "slight" hang, yet no error messages or malfunction.

(Which this may be Normal)?

Just thought I would throw that in...Of course I use Internet Explorer 11. So that would be in your case not "Firefox" specific.

Regards,

All the Best,

Cliff
McAfee Volunteer
milstone
Contributor
Message 119 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Dougr -

My XP machine no longer thrashes the floppy drive with the vulnerability scanner enabled. Has a bug fix been added to one of the daily McAfee updates?

The other problem that coincided with the floppy drive issue, excessive CPU loading by MCSHIELD, still exists. Every time I start a program or read an e-mail message MCSHIELD goes to 99% CPU load and stays there for at least 10 seconds. It frequently does that when closing a program also.

As has been pointed out in this thread, the floppy problem is easy to work around by disabling the drive in Device Manager. However, the only way I can prevent the McAfee software from crippling this computer is to disable the Vulnerability Scanner.

Can you confirm a fix for the floppy problem and provide a progress update on the CPU hogging problem?

Peacekeeper
Message 120 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

We have not been told of any fix other than the June date. I will ping a tech and ask.

Can you post the version of Security centre and Virusscan as well as Vulnerability scaner please

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 25/04/14 7:15:09 AM
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