McAfee's Downed Your Computer? Here is the fix.

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Terry Love

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Fix for the McAfee anti virus program that disabled thousands of computers running XP Pro Windows this morning.

This morning and virus signature update from for McAfee Total Protection took down thousands of computers.

The update causes the antivirus program to identify a critical system file as a virus and subsequently remove it.

Directions:

The fix involves replacing the file. I did this by copying it from a working Windows XP computer.

  • Copy svchost from the directory "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32" I had to do this by burning it to a CDR because the affected computer was not able to properly read USB drives.
  • On the affected machine pull up your task manager by hitting "Ctrl+Alt+Del."
  • Click "File" and select "New Task (Run...)."\
  • In the box that appears type "command" and hit enter.
  • At the command prompt that pops up type "copy d:\svchost c:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\" (Where "d:" represents the drive letter for the cd drive you are copying from.)
  • The prompt should say "1 file(s) copied."
  • Restarting your computer should bring everything back as expected.
-Caleb
McAfee, McAffee antivirus fix

And here is McAfee's patch and instructions I found a day later.
 
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