Over the past month, I have gone through a series of chats and a call in an effort to clean up various errors, and scan issues with McAfee. I can almost see the finish line, but I'm not quite there. The errors that remains are in 2 categories:
1. When I run the Registry Mechanic program, it can clean up all of the errors on my system with the exception of 5 that are rated "high" and in McAfee areas. During my most recent chat, I ran the Registry Mechanic while the McAfee support person watched and in the end I got the usual response "if McAfee says your system is Ok, then there is no problem"
2. Before most, if not all, of my chats with McAfee I would run the McAfee Virtual Technician. For a long time, I had 2 errors and then finally down to 1 that reported a problem with the firewall. Some of the support people have no idea what to do with the Virtual technician. The last 2 fell back on the usual response of "if McAfee says your system is OK, then there is no problem". During a brief phone call today, I was told to ignore the errors from the Virtual Technician because it's not always accurate !!!
Prior to today's cleanup, uninstall, reinstall, the support folks also could not get through the quarantined files. When trying to view the files in order to delete them, the session would hang and we would have to cancel and restart. We'll never know what happened here because the quarantine was cleaned out as part of the McAfee cleanup that was run today.
These are just a few of the errors that I encountered while trying to get the scheduled scan to run and then to get it to run in less than 5 hours. In my opinion, the McAfee software itself was damaged or infected, but that can't be an issue. I spent an inordinate amount of time going through the same script with McAfee support personnel and repeating the same steps. During one chat, when I tried to get the McAfee person to listen to my issues and in particular the Virtual Technician, he just canceled the chat session. Also, as I stated in another post, not one McAfee person suggested to me to change the setting for the "minimal resource usage".
At this point, both the manual scan and scheduled scan are working and in a reasonable amount of time; and since McAfee says my system is Ok I guess I'll live with the other errors for a while. On the othe hand, I still have about 30 days to cancel my subscription which was just recently renewed.
In my opinion Registry Cleaner programs do more harm than they do good. I've seen to many times where it cleans more than it is supposed to and then the overall performance of the computer is degraded because of missing files and registry keys.
Why don't you run another MVT session and post the id number here on the forum. This way we can have a reference to it and the forum moderator could maybe dig a little bit deeper into this for you.
1. I guess we'll just disagree with registry cleanup programs. When I use Registry Mechanic, it helps my system performance. Many, if not most, application programs muck with the registry and leave it a mess.
2. When the McAfee rep ran his cleanup, it removed the Virtual Technician. The re-install does not reinstall VT. When I try to download it from the McAfee site, it fails with a network error.
When you install /try to install MVT take the option remove. Then reboot and retry the install.
Tony,
Thanks for the info. The ermoval option did allow me to download the VT.
However, when I ran it there were a couple of new issues: (1) 3 McAfee sites were added to the trusted site list that pops up from IE, so I went and removed them, and (2) VT says that I have no McAfee products installed.
Post the session ID I assume you are saying Mcafee is actually installed and MVT is a tad remiss in saying it isn't?
With the session ID I will get our admin to check it.
I tried again, and same result.
session id = 26869142
Ok will not be in till Monday so while wait I would suggest a final uninstall reinstall using the MCPR tool I sent the id to both admins
http://service.mcafee.com/FAQDocument.aspx?lc=1033&id=TS100507
Reset Internet explorer
run preinstall tool
http://download.mcafee.com/products/licensed/cust_support_patches/McPreinstall.exe
I know you have tried it but try it 1 last time and leave the cleaners alone for this run as tom says sometimes they do mess up.
Thank you for your input. However, I'm not going to do another uninstall/reinstall.
I'll live without the VT and the few errors remaining in the registry, and decide if it's time to get rid of McAfee.
Understand so wait for the techs analysis as sometimes MVT gives some funny answers ie missing files etc when there are none.
New to the forums or need help finding your way around the forums? There's a whole hub of community resources to help you.
Thousands of customers use the McAfee Community for peer-to-peer and expert product support. Enjoy these benefits with a free membership: