Mcafee's Mcshield.exe process taking up 30-40% of CPU.

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Nobi125

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 7, 2005
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It doesn't happen all the time but it does it quit a bit, the process will basically just bring my brother's computer to a lurch. It's really annoying. Disabling Mcafee's active-shield makes it go away, but then he isn't protected from viruses.

Also, it never used to do this.

Anyone know how to fix this?
 
nobi125 said:
It doesn't happen all the time but it does it quit a bit, the process will basically just bring my brother's computer to a lurch. It's really annoying. Disabling Mcafee's active-shield makes it go away, but then he isn't protected from viruses.

Also, it never used to do this.

Anyone know how to fix this?
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It happened on my system back when I had mcafee - but it would go to 99.999 and completely make the system non responsive (I'm talking I had to restart, go into the confirm-every-damn-step safe mode and then uninstall it to get it to work again). Then I'd reinstall and it would happen again maybe a month later (I really don't remember). After the third time or so (it happened so rarely it really did take 3 times to bother me much) I decided to ditch mcafee. I was actually very happy being AV free again (never ran a firewall on this) and it has been that way for a long while. I downloaded a free version of AntiVir Guard (free for personal use) just last week or so after a long while without AV and ran a HDD check just for shits thinking it would come up empty or maybe find one "baddy" at which point I would fix and uninstall. It found like 12+!!!! so now i'm running that. I'm still not motivated enough to run a firewall though :D
 
Spetsnaz Op said:
It happened on my system back when I had mcafee - but it would go to 99.999 and completely make the system non responsive (I'm talking I had to restart, go into the confirm-every-damn-step safe mode and then uninstall it to get it to work again). Then I'd reinstall and it would happen again maybe a month later (I really don't remember). After the third time or so (it happened so rarely it really did take 3 times to bother me much) I decided to ditch mcafee. I was actually very happy being AV free again (never ran a firewall on this) and it has been that way for a long while. I downloaded a free version of AntiVir Guard (free for personal use) just last week or so after a long while without AV and ran a HDD check just for shits thinking it would come up empty or maybe find one "baddy" at which point I would fix and uninstall. It found like 12+!!!! so now i'm running that. I'm still not motivated enough to run a firewall though :D
Click to expand...

I concur. I used McAfee for a while, but it seems like it has serious problems. It would always go up to 99% for me sometimes for VERY LONG periods of time. Or I could end the program and then have to wait several minutes for my desktop to come back. I never found anything to fix it either because despite numerous threads about it on the McAfee forum, McAfee tech support is about as helpful as beating your head on the wall. I also encountered a problem with their spam protection program, which I did find a fix for... but despite McAfee knowing about it for a long time, they never patched it. The fix also meant cleaning out a bunch of files every so often or just uninstalling the spam protection. I've been using Nod32 now and it is really good. It also wasn't named from "technical consultants" as one of many av programs with buffer overflow exploits. It also seems to find quite a bit more stuff than anything else I've ever used. That's not to say its thinking they're the wrong files either, because it's not. Also, I don't know why people recommend AVG... it's not bad, but I don't think there's anything special about it. That's just MHO tho.
 
Mcafee and norton are big memory hogs. That is one reason why I went with NOD32, much better IMO...
 
my school wont let you connect to the network if you are running windows without mcafee, which is why i primarly switched to ubuntu for everything on the internet, and just windows for my gaming needs.
 
compslckr said:
my school wont let you connect to the network if you are running windows without mcafee,
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thats just wrong, at least there is the nix circumvention
I understand the absolute need to suppress malware on those cesspools called college LANs
but a single Windows option also makes any single exploit McAfee falls down on a system wide failure.
(with the exception of you of course :p) there should be a greater mix.

Not to mention yet again its a bloated resource hog

are the copies free and did they adopt it for central administration and monitoring or something?
 
when we move in to our dorms there is an ethernet cord and a mcafee disk and instructions on what to do. it is a resource hog, and it dosn't even seem to do that good of a job. last year they let us use norton, mcafee, avg or kaspersky (i used and loved kaspersky), but this year its mcafee only. at least they give it to us for free, we also can't play ANY games online, or even on lan unless we disconnect from the campus lan and set up our own dhcp and game servers.
 
smack you local admin over the head with this

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1913701,00.asp
http://www.rem0te.com/frame/research.html
http://xforce.iss.net/xforce/alerts/id/190

Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer and co-founder at eEye Digital Security, said he believes anti-virus product flaws could lead to the first big non-Microsoft worm. "One of these days, I really think that someone will be motivated to create a really nasty exploit against one of these file decoding overflows, and it could be just as devastating as any automated worm attack," Maiffret said.

Maiffret cited the stealth attack against the University of Connecticut last year, in which hackers avoided detection for two years after placing a rootkit on a server that contained names, social security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers and addresses for most of the university's 72,000 students, staff and faculty.

"If there's an anti-virus flaw in a software on a business desktop, that makes that company a target. I can send a single malformed file through e-mail, targeting a specific user. and I can take control of that machine. That's the kind of attack that avoids publicity and avoids detection,"
Click to expand...

"[Wheeler blamed the bulk of the bugs on poor coding techniques and also pointed to an alarming tendency among anti-virus vendors to avoid fixing the actual flaws by using "heuristics" exploit detection.

They] fix a bug in their code by trying to detect exploits with their own product, which of course still contains the bug," Wheeler said in an e-mail exchange with eWEEK.
Click to expand...
 
compslckr said:
my school wont let you connect to the network if you are running windows without mcafee, which is why i primarly switched to ubuntu for everything on the internet, and just windows for my gaming needs.
Click to expand...
same thing here @ SU.

They've even custom scripted the damn thing to prevent users from forcing updates - someone who works for the campus CMS (computing and media services) said that they have an on-campus server that pushes updates to all the students - supposedly the updates are often pushed to us before they're even released to the public.

In years past, they let us do what we want, as long as we acknowledge that if anything goes wrong with our computer, they would take their sweet ass time to try and diagnose it (thank GOD that I know what I'm doing). This year, I tried using AVG, but their server noticed it, and they contacted me saying that they'd shut off my port.

I can't wait till I live off campus next year.
 
yeah, we have to use cisco clean access agent, and everytime we restart our computer we have to login to the system and it makes sure we have mcafee running, that we have the latest windows updates and that there are no "illegal" programs running such as torrent clients, limewire, ares, mytunes redux etc. if it finds anything thing wrong we get quarantined, during which time we can only access pages hosted by the school, such as easternct.edu, our eweb service (registration/view grades), and webct (professors post assignments up on there, as well as grades and progress).

Everyone that works in the IT help desk know nothing, i think most of them are actually psych and communications majors, its reall frusterating trying to talk to them because you can tell that they have been taught exactly what to say and that they actrually have no idea what they are saying or telling us to do. i am glad i know whats going on.
 
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