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bitfiddler
Former Member
Message 1 of 3

"McAfee Security Center has stopped working" errors every few days.

This error occurs every few days: A Windows pop-up alert says "McAfee Security Center has stopped working". I close the informational alert, the McAfee security center icon in the system tray re-appears, and everything seems to work ok after that until the next time which can be the next day or several days in the future. Sometimes I hibernate the machine at night, sometimes I do a complete shutdown and restart, but that doesn't seem to affect this problem at all.

In the Windows7 pro x64 "Reliability History" I see an error that coincides with each occurence - five in the last month.

See the pic of the error detail snipped from the Windows action center reliability history section.

The errors seem somewhat benign and may have something to do with a failure of a routine McAfee update to start or finish properly and is causing a Security Center application crash and restart.

After the errors are reported, everything still seems to be working OK, and the next McAfee update happens correctly without any action on my part.

The faulting module, McUpdShm.dll, is always the same, with the exact same fauting offset and exception code.

The dll module is known as the "McAfee Update Shim Layer", which is an extension of the security center.

The question is, of course, does anyone have an idea what is going on here?

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2 Replies
Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 2 of 3

Re: "McAfee Security Center has stopped working" errors every few days.

Looking at the information you have provided, I think this may well be related to a clutch of problems that people are encountering with McSvHost. One of the posters there identified a problem with mcmscshm.dll, and yours is with mcupdshm.dll; the "shm" refers to the Security Center Shim Layer. There's a wikipedia link explaining that term in one of my posts in this thread.

Keep an eye on that thread for developments, some of it may be relevant to your question.

bitfiddler
Former Member
Message 3 of 3

Re: "McAfee Security Center has stopped working" errors every few days.

Thanks for the info.

I've run MVT and found no errors, and this particular machine is running almost flawlessly; The only routine error being generated is the one described here.

I'll keep an eye on that other thread you mentioned, which has much interesting information.

With a little more research I see that the behavior is very regular. The error occurs exactly once each day. In this machine it is 8:00pm local time unless the machine is busy and then the error is defered until the machine is idle, and then it occurs. If the machine is hibernated at the time the error would occur then the error will not occur until the next day at 8:00 pm.

So now the question becomes: How can I tell what McAfee task happens every 24 hours at 8:00 pm local? Peeking at the registry settings for McAfee, it looks as if there are many scheduled things, but the times are in a machine timestamp format that's I can't decipher. I see settings for a thing called "Sync" with an interval of 86400, and that would be 24 hours of seconds.

Per that other discussion, I turned off NetGuard to no effect, and I am not running "Alcohol 120%" or related software.

Message was edited by: bitfiddler on 1/26/12 9:35:24 PM CST
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