What the? McAfee made 70 file folders in my Win directory!

[ahhaa]

I don't go into the Win folder as often as I used to, but I was looking for a temp file... and discovered 70some folders labelled like mcu72.tmp or mcuF.tmp; and they all contain the same except for the date- McAppIns.exe & two update-related files like UpdResp.mcaf - only the created dates are different, tho some have subfolders containing more duplicates.

The thing is, I thought I'd given McAfee the heaveho for Norton, a couple years ago.

As tmp. files, I'm assuming that I can safely delete all these folders, but've heard horror stories about getting all the tentacles of IS suites off a computer. I'm having awful long shutdown times, altho Norton & Adaware & Spybot & the like all say everything is fine...

any advice on really removing McAfee?

a related issue, I have about a zillion $NtUninstalKB****$ folders in Win as well, I'm assuming they are Knowledge Base updates uninstallers. Are they all really needed?

[jman98]

I have a suggestion that depending on your level of computer expertise will either be absolutely useless to you or a godsend. Are you marginally competent in Unix/Linux? If so, go to
http://www.cygwin.com
and download the Cygwin toolkit. Use the command
rm -rf FILENAME
to get rid of pesky files. If you know your stuff, you should know what to replace FILENAME with to delete more than one file at a time.

If you are not an experienced Unix/Linux user, this will be a TERRIBLE idea for you and I don't at all recommend you do this. Nor will I spend my time explaining to you how to use the Cygwin toolkit. If you don't understand what it is after going to the website, please ignore this suggestion. Trying to do it without knowing the fundamentals will only make your life much much worse. However, if you know Unix/Linux, this can be an absolutely terrific way to quickly delete pesk files/directories that badly behaved software creates.

I don't recommend Norton. Friends don't let friends use Norton, in my opinion. AVG is much better for anti-virus and Zone Alarms makes a superior firewall. Other that Ghost, which actually is a useful program, in my opinion there is absolutely nothing else that Norton does for you that you REALLY need. Your 'awful long shutdown times" may be 100% attributable to Norton. Sorry, but it's true. My dad uses Norton. It takes his PC forever to boot and shutdown.

[ROF]

I don't recommend Norton. Friends don't let friends use Norton, in my opinion. AVG is much better for anti-virus and Zone Alarms makes a superior firewall. Other that Ghost, which actually is a useful program, in my opinion there is absolutely nothing else that Norton does for you that you REALLY need. Your 'awful long shutdown times" may be 100% attributable to Norton. Sorry, but it's true. My dad uses Norton. It takes his PC forever to boot and shutdown.

I second this.

. . . queue Norton lover . .

[Dv8ted2]

Zone Alarms makes a superior firewall.

That is debateable. I had a horror story with zone alarm that wiped out my internet connection. It renames a system file and if you uninstall zone-alarm, you are screwed.

I discourage the use of zone-alarm. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

ahhaa,

Since these are temp files, you should be able to safely delete these files.

[ROF]

I actually had a good laugh a few weeks ago at the expense of Norton Anti-Virus 2005. A customer wanted me to remove it because they had recently joined an ISP that provided Anti-Virus software which was installed. The thing that made me laugh is the uninstall .exe file for Norton had a virus that was dedicated by the new anti-virus as soon as I clicked on it. The new Anti-Virus could not delete it and wanted to know if I wanted to quarantine it. I said yes and then the Anti-Virus went nutz finding a whole bunch of norton files that supposedly contained a virus. I could not help but laugh.

[Wile_E]

Norton Internet Security is also a big memory and cpu hog. Norton corporate anti-virus is actually okay, as we use it at work. But for home use I don't recommend it anymore. It slowed down my system so much. I removed it and everything was much faster.

ZoneAlarm has lost my trust. A while back, they were caught phoning home and sending back private data without the users consent. There have also been rumors that the government has been using the data. Stay away from Computer Associates products too. They have been involved in some devious court cases. I don't support companies that are shady.

Here are my recommendations for Anti-virus and firewall...
Avast Antivirus
AVG
Kaspersky Anti-Virus
Outpost Pro Firewall
Kerio Firewall

[BJ_M]

i would 100% agree with Wile_E 's list

[ahhaa]

jman & all- thanks!
Well, I'm tinkering around with MEPIS, Puppy, and Ubuntu; but wouldn't say I'm competent yet on the command line. I remember the wildcard thing from DOS, so I get what you are saying...
(plug: for you guys with old computers, Puppy really revitalizes most any machine back to the P-II era)

I don't much like Norton or McAfee; especially their prices. In the past, I've just used their competitive upgrade swap to get them cheap as I can. I've got Trend on my laptop, cause they included wireless free, but I wouldn't brag about that one either.

more & more lately, I'm thinking virtual machine...