McAfee Total Protection: As a service virus scan won’t update – McAfee Un-Install Cleanup
The other day I came across a problem while when installing McAfee Total Protection “as-a-service” (mcafeeasap.com) on a laptop which had a free trial version of McAfee pre-installed.
Once installed, the Virus scan part of McAfee as a service would say it was downloading the latest definitions but would never complete.
The taskbar status icon was grey and would stay greyed out (it’s supposed to be red if all is ok).
After much digging and google searching I came across quite a few methods to try and fix this but none seemed to work.
Here are the steps I took to fix this issue…
McAfee Total Protection Clean Install Procedure…
Follow all of the steps below to fix the issue.
NOTE: Ignore if ANY of the trouble shooting steps below end in failure and continue to proceed with them all in order…
Uninstallation / Cleanup:
1. Log on to your security center at www.mcafeeasap.com
2. Click on the “Utilities” tab-> select the sub tab “Migration & Optimization“.
3. Under the Cleanup Utility –> select the Download option.
4. Download and save it to the desktop then run the downloaded .exe file to uninstall.
5. Delete all entries from Start->Run->temp (usually “C:\windows\temp” depending on how your OS was installed) – Select all the files and folders and delete them (Ignore any files that you can’t delete)
6. Delete all entries from start->Run->%temp% (This is the user’s temp folder e.g. “C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp”) – Select all the files and folder under that and delete. (Ignore any files that you can’t delete)
7. Reboot the computer.
BEFORE YOU CONTINUE… Reset the Windows firewall to default and then disable the windows firewall before you start the installation.
Installation :
To install the updates for the Total Protection Service, use the Silent installation method.
1. Open the webpage www.mcafeeasap.com and login with your details.
2. Click on “Utilities” at the top
3. Under the “Installation” tab, select the second option “Silent installation” to download.
4. save the vssetup.exe file to your c: drive.
5. Now click Start –> type cmd.exe into the search field.
6. Then right-click on cmd.exe and click “Run as administrator” to open the command prompt in admin mode.
7. Type cd\ (and hit the enter key)
6.Type or copy this command and paste
VSSETUP.EXE /CK=012345678901234567890123 /P=VFB
You must put YOUR company key in the above command (replace the numbers after CK=) and then run the command (hit enter).
The letter after the “P” parameter, V is the virus scan, F is the firewall and B the browser protection. If you want to install all these features leave the command as it is. if you don’t want a particualr feature installed you need to remove the letter (V, F or B) from the above command.
Run a complete update from the M shield icon (right click) after the install is done with the above method.
I hope this helps you out.
If it works for you tweet me to say thanks or 