What's New: McAfee Update Crashes PCs

McAfee says 0.5% of its users - thousands of PCs worldwide - were affected by an update that mistakenly quarantined a vital Windows XP file, causing PCs to crash with a STOP error and endlessly restart. The update issued Wednesday morning flagged svchost.exe, a file that launches most Windows services. McAfee is still investigating but indications are the problem affected PCs running Windows XP with Service Pack 3 and a specific program feature that is not enabled by default on most systems. Affected systems need the anti-virus update removed or replaced and the svchost.exe file replaced in order to recover, a time consuming and manual process.

Thursday, Apr 22, 2010 09:28 am CDT

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