by danpaul88 » July 13th, 2011, 7:23 am
Sounds to me like you might still have gremlins in your system f*cking around with the NTFS permissions... something running in the background which, every X minutes, goes and modifies the permissions of a given set of folders to deny you access...
This is typical virus behavior, especially the kind that pretends to be a virus scanner and suddenly pops up ads to 'fix' your computer for $$$... if you pay, it will either do nothing or it will undo the file permission changes. Setting the permissions to deny is a good way to convince computer novices that their system is broken and needs fixing
McAfee probably crashes because it just assumes that the SYSTEM account (under which its scanning engine service likely runs) has access to anything on the PC and doesn't bother to handle the permissions failures. On a normal installation this is not an unjustified assumption, since SYSTEM normally does have access to everything, but its still bad design to make the assumption.
EDIT: Looking at your screenshot... McAfee isn't actually crashing, although it could be a lot more specific about WHAT the problem was (ie: the file it last tried to access, the result of the access attempt etc)
Sounds to me like you might still have gremlins in your system f*cking around with the NTFS permissions... something running in the background which, every X minutes, goes and modifies the permissions of a given set of folders to deny you access...
This is typical virus behavior, especially the kind that pretends to be a virus scanner and suddenly pops up ads to 'fix' your computer for $$$... if you pay, it will either do nothing or it will undo the file permission changes. Setting the permissions to deny is a good way to convince computer novices that their system is broken and needs fixing :P
McAfee probably crashes because it just assumes that the SYSTEM account (under which its scanning engine service likely runs) has access to anything on the PC and doesn't bother to handle the permissions failures. On a normal installation this is not an unjustified assumption, since SYSTEM normally does have access to everything, but its still bad design to make the assumption.
EDIT: Looking at your screenshot... McAfee isn't actually crashing, although it could be a lot more specific about WHAT the problem was (ie: the file it last tried to access, the result of the access attempt etc)