Hi Joseph.

I have used McAfee for a long time, and I would say that all of the versions
are fine all the time you leave them alone, as soon as you try to alter
something everything goes wrong.

My latest, installed on a reformatted virgin XP Pro drive almost a year ago
is McAfee Internet Security which includes VirusScan 7 and Guardian Firewall
as well as other security software.

About a month ago I started getting a warning pop-up informing me that the
12 months of virus definition updates was due to expire pay more, I had
expected this.  I clicked on the Purchase option,but nothing happened so I
chose the Help option and was directed to the McAfee website, as this told
me that I wasn't a registered customer, which of course I was, I rang and
was told to remove the existing installation using add and remove,
re-install, then re-register.  I did this with some trepidation as
uninstalling and re-installing McAfee had always led to BIG problems in the
past.  My fears were well founded this was a BIG MISTAKE, and spelt the end
of normal working for 3 days.

The re-install went ok but the online up-grade/update process hung after
downloading all up grades and 160+ virus definitions, and installing about
100 of the updates.  Why a separate file, or the last update can't contain
all of the definitions beats me. It was was eventually told that up-date
100ish has a known problem, why don't they fix it?

Lots of phone calls later, (using their instant online typing help is a
complete waste of time for all but the simplest questions), and days of
waiting to be called by a technician resulted in the PC sort of working
again.  I still keep getting the XP Pro windows telling me that the firewall
has had a problem and will be closed, and I still haven't managed to
purchase a further 12 months of updates so I have a almost permanent
reminder window minimised on the task bar, I am manually updating at the
moment.

I really think that the only way to get back to where I was before the
McAfee debacle is to reformat the hard drive and re-install everything, a
process which usually takes me a couple of days and has many moments when I
wished I hadn't started it.  Being on broadband I do consider a firewall is
essential and am thinking of trying Norton Pro as an alternative, but I am
certain that it will take more than a simple un-install of McAfee and an
install of Norton to produce a fully operational system.

You would have thought that McAfee would have made the payment of money to
them as easy as possible.  So the upshot is that you are not alone in trying
to overcome the apparent deficiencies of McAfee's products.

Kind regards Noel

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