I spent 15 minutes on the phone yesterday with my old friend Marty, trying to work out why his Web browser was feeding him a steady diet of “page not found” error messages. SBC is taking its own sweet time getting his DSL line set up, so he’s stuck on dial-up in his new home. And he couldn’t connect to the Web despite his best efforts.
We went through the standard troubleshooting drill. Did you use the Internet Setup Wizard? Yep. Does ipconfig say you have an IP address and a valid DNS server? No problem there. Can you ping a remote site? Yep. But nslookup failed, and bypassing the DNS servers by typing a numeric IP address in the browser’s address bar didn’t work.
“Hmmm,” says I. “Do you have a firewall installed?”
“No,” says Marty. “I checked McAfee Security Center, and it says that Personal Firewall is not installed. All I have is their antivirus software. I even tried disabling it, but no luck.”
We stumbled around for a few more minutes, and I gave him a few suggestions, including removing and reinstalling all network components. (I also told him to ignore his ISP’s well-meaning but mostly clueless tech support staff, who had pointed him to an ancient KB article that described a problem with the Windows 98 Winsock components. Sheesh.)
About 20 minutes later, a message from Marty popped into my Inbox:
After 20 hours of agony–tweaking, changing, experimenting, restarting, more tweaking ect. turns out my internet DNS problem was that the nasty folks at McAfee activated, without my permission or notification, a copy of Mcafee Firewall on my PC. This was not listed in the McAfee Security Center so I had no way of even knowing it was there.
I was getting desperate so I was heading off the “add/remove software” function to get rid of my pop up blocker when I noticed Mcafee Firewall had been installed during what I thought was a routine update of the virus files.
Mcafee–What a bunch of assholes!
Thanks for your moral support and efforts……
I knew it! This sounded too much like an overly protective firewall, especially after ruling out every other reasonable explanation.
As for McAfee, well… Earlier this year, after receiving a free copy with a new Dell PC, I briefly experimented with the latest version of McAfee’s antivirus software. It was better than previous versions, but still too intrusive for my tastes. When it failed to recognize a half-dozen copies of Bagle one week, I jettisoned it.
I don’t recommend McAfee software to anyone, and when I see a friend using it, I usually suggest that they switch to something else at the first reasonable opportunity. (My current personal favorite is Trend Micro’s PC-cillin.)
Ed Bott 
I agree completely.
Recently, on someone else’s Dell computer with the McAfee Security Center software, I couldn’t even figure out if the anti-virus program was running or not, let alone the date of the virus definitions it was using. Is a DAT file virus definitions? Is an “online” virus thing their web based AV scan or the software resident on the computer?
Another person with a Dell computer has complained to me that their McAfee software was also reporting things that were not true, much like this case where it said the firewall was not installed.
Yes McAfee is problematic on Dells. It has been interfering with Outlook Express since I purchased my system. It causes OE to NOT save the server settings, so I have to re-input them everytime I start OE. Now my trial subscription has run out and I cannot figure out how to uninstall McAfee without messing with the registry. Everything I find on Dell or McAfee’s Web sites says to use the Add/Remove program function yet it does not appear in this list. Any other ideas would be appreciated. Sneaky buggers.