McAfee Meandering

A friend called this morning with a problem installing McAfee software on her (relatively) new PC. The computer had come with a McAfee trial installed. When the trial expired and she was asked to pay for a one year subscription, she uninstalled the software. As a Comcast Internet customer, she had a free McAfee install coming to her.

After going to comcast.net/security, entering her username and password, she started the installation of the McAfee software. She soon got a dialog that said "McAfee Integrated Security Platform Installer has encountered a problem and needs to close." Several re-tries, including reboots, gave the same results.

The phone runaround then began. Comcast support said to call McAfee. McAfee said to call Microsoft. Microsoft said to call Dell. Dell wanted money to even attempt to address the problem.

After receiving our friend's call, I first googled the error message. The results were mainly postings a year or older. The consensus advice was to uninstall MSXML2 and MSXML3, then reinstall them. However, this was clearly not successful for everyone. Other advice included running McAfee's uninstall clean-up (MCPR.exe), although links to that were all broken. I also happened upon a page McAfee labeled as Free Tools, one of which was supposed to check the installation of McAfee software.

When our friend brought her computer over, the first thing I did was try to install the software. The results were the same for me as for her. Since the computer had the 64-bit version of Vista, I chose to skip any attempt to uninstall and re-install any version of MSXML. Instead, I went to McAfee's Free Tools and ran the McAfee Virtual Technician.

I was a little concerned when this turned out to be a full-fledged app with an installation program, since there was every chance that the root cause of the install issue might cause the tool's install to fail as well. Fortunately, the install proceeded without a hitch. The app ran and told me there was no McAfee software installed. I had actually hoped it would tell me there was a broken installation of the trial version. Anyway, the tool then asked if I wanted to install something, and when I said yes, cited 5 or 6 things that needed to be done in preparation, such as cleaning out temporary files. I let the tool take care of those, retried the McAfee security installation, and it worked.