RunningBum
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2007
- Messages
- 13,236
I just spent a few hours getting my work laptop back online. It turns out that McAfee pushed out a bad update (DAT 5958) which thinks that svchost.exe is a virus to be removed. This causes you to be unable to connect to the internet, loses your taskbar at the bottom, and other problems.
The fix is to go to http://vil.nai.com/vil/5958_false.htm (you can navigate there from the macafee.com homepage if you don't trust the URL). I used solution 1, which involves downloading an exe file from another laptop not affected onto a USB thumb drive, and run it in safe mode on the affected laptop.
If you've only got a single laptop and it's affected, you're probably screwed because you can't get online to see this, but if you got on via another laptop or know of someone with the problem, this is the fix.
McAfee really screwed up on this one. Looks like they rushed out an update to detect a worm without good testing. I'm in very much the same line of work (different type of software, but the principles very much apply) and this is inexcusable.
The fix is to go to http://vil.nai.com/vil/5958_false.htm (you can navigate there from the macafee.com homepage if you don't trust the URL). I used solution 1, which involves downloading an exe file from another laptop not affected onto a USB thumb drive, and run it in safe mode on the affected laptop.
If you've only got a single laptop and it's affected, you're probably screwed because you can't get online to see this, but if you got on via another laptop or know of someone with the problem, this is the fix.
McAfee really screwed up on this one. Looks like they rushed out an update to detect a worm without good testing. I'm in very much the same line of work (different type of software, but the principles very much apply) and this is inexcusable.