The McAfee chat line help gave me ring around the rosy on this one.
I have had the McAfee firewall and the anti-virus program on my Windows 98 system since last October with no problems. Yesterday, when I downloaded the routine updates, System File Checker reported that 4 VXD files dated 2003 had been replaced by older versions dated 2001.
mcutil.vxd 3.0.0.118 --> 1.0.0.472
vshinit.vxd 3.0.0.104 --> 1.0.0.185
mckml.vxd 3.0.0.118 --> 1.0.0.472
vshield.vxd 3.0.0.119 --> 1.0.0.231
I think som other files had older versions substituted also.
The McAfee chat help people kept asking for data from my system, which is hard to get because the McAfee windows don't have the normal minimize button. So, my system kept locking up. Three technicians later I was told there was another AV program on the system and that I must uninstall McAfee and every third party utility and start over with only McAfee.
I tried to explain that Norton Anti Virus and Norton Live Update were long gone, but that I still use Norton Utilities. I also mentioned that an inactive version of Zone Alarm was on the system.
It was like talking to the wall with the last technician. My impression was that the advice was coming from a manual.
It doesn't make sense to me that I could be using McAfee for several months and then all of a sudden it decides to be incompatible with stuff that isn't even on the system now.
My parting words to the technician were something like "Thanks, but I must now find another AV program from another company that doesn't have so many compatibility problems. Goodbye".
Using Control Panel I uninstalled McAfee Virus Scan but left the Personal Firewall Plus on the system.
But, when I tried to reinstall the software from the CD, it kept hanging up with "Script Error - Line 4654 - Char 7 - Error Invalid Procedure Call or Argument - Code 0 - URL mcp://M:\VSC\ENU\VSOINS.UI
::install.
htm
I downloaded and ran the Microsoft script patch JS56MEN.EXE which responded that MS VBscript 5.6 was installed.
That didn't help, so I tried something that has worked before --> Copying the entire contents of the CD to the Desktop and running from there. My reasoning there is that a read only CD would reject creation of temporary files on it.
This time the error was not identified, but each time I tried to restart the system and try again it wiped out the contents of VSC\ENU, even after setting attributes to Read Only.
By this time I am down on McAfee, but would like to do the installation just to see whether it will do subsequent updates correctly.
All comments are welcome, but I plan to award the points to the clearest, most understandable narrative that doesn't list a bunch of URLs to other sites. I know how to use Google myself.
