* The McAfee Saga - Family Historian disappears

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The McAfee Saga - Family Historian disappears

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As the main Forum post on this is now very long here is a summary:

Users started reporting problems on the Saturday 17th of September. The only people affected used BT Net Protect or McAfee. McAfee produced a fix for the problem during the evening of the 20th September which began rolling out to users that evening. If you are still having the problem please ensure you have at least DAT version 6475.

For the full saga please see
http://www.fhug.org.uk/cgi-bin/index.cg ... y&num=5416

Below are the two summarising posts from Simon Orde the Family Historian designer.

Simon Orde Posted the following on the thread on the 19th.
FH stopped working    Posted on: 19/09/11 at 13:19:27 GMT
Thank you very much for everyone who has posted to this forum. I can confirm that we also have received numerous reports of this problem, and yes indeed it does appear to be a problem with McAfee.

We have already emailed McAfee and asked them to fix the problem. We are asking everyone affected to also email McAfee directly if you haven’t already done so. The more people who do this, the sooner they are likely to respond. Getting through to AntiVirus companies is often very difficult because they get such a huge volume of emails. Also, their systems are highly automated and designed to deal with submitted program samples, which the sender believes either (i) may contain a virus, or (ii) is a 'false positive'. Neither of these apply in this case. McAfee isn't detecting anything wrong with Family Historian. It is simply causing it to crash. Antivirus products should never cause other programs to crash; so this is just a bug.

We believe that if you email McAfee's virus labs at Virus_Research@avertlabs.com with the word 'noauto' in the subject line, there is a good chance that your email will get through. Without the word 'noauto' it will be treated automatically as a virus/'false positive' submission. In your email, please explain clearly what has happened and why they need to respond urgently. If you have a BT product, do please complain to BT too. They are likely to be in a good position to get McAfee to act. And if you have already emailed McAfee or BT – thank you! It’s much appreciated.

Two other things: Please don't stop posting to this forum! It's a very helpful forum, both for getting an idea of how widespread the problem is, but also for sharing tips and ideas about what to do about it.

In a day or two, hopefully, McAfee will have fixed the problem. When they do, the fix will be rolled out by automatic update and FH will start working again. If anyone who had the problem notices that FH has suddenly started working again, please post here to say so, so that those people who have uninstalled McAfee or who have disabled updates, can try and work out when it's safe for them to re-enable McAfee again. Many thanks.




Posted by Simon on: 21/09/11 at 09:56:53 GMT
We have now heard back from McAfee. I'm very pleased to say that they say they've fixed the problem! They say: 'This issue has been corrected. Please instruct your users to update their McAfee protection to the latest DAT version 6475 released today [i.e. yesterday - tuesday]'. I suspect that the rollout of this new update (and probably all updates) will be staggered, to avoid everyone trying to download the same files simultaneously. So it may take a while before everyone gets the new update. If you try to update manually and are told that you already have the latest version, this may just mean that the new version isn't available for you yet.

Also, you probably don't need to manually update anyway if you don't want to. If you wait for a while, I would expect that your McAfee antivirus product will update itself automatically eventually anyway.

Thank you very much to everyone who has helped crack this problem by pooling information here so that it quickly became apparent that it was a McAfee problem, by emailing us with program/version details etc, and by chasing McAfee and BT to get them to fix the problem!
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