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McAfee Kills SVCHost.exe, Sets Off Reboot Loops For Win XP, Win 2000

Posted by timothy on from the hope-you-were-using-antiantivirus-too dept.

Kohenkatz writes "A McAfee Update today (DAT 5958) incorrectly identifies svchost.exe, a critical Windows executable, as a virus and tries to remove it, causing endless reboot loops." Reader jswackh adds this terse description: "So far the fixes are sneakernet only. An IT person will have to touch all affected PCs. Reports say that it quarantines SVCHOST. [Affected computers] have no network access, and missing are taskbar/icons/etc. Basically non-functioning. Windows 7 seems to be unaffected." Updated 20100421 20:08 GMT by timothy: An anonymous reader points out this easy-to-follow fix for the McAfee flub.

3 of 472 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Guess what I've been doing all morning? by JamesP · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Funny that one of the 'false reasons' against Open Source is liability

    So are you going to sue the bastards for lost time and productivity?? You should.

    --
    how long until /. fixes commenting on Chrome?
  2. Re:For a program so hard to turn off by clone53421 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whitelist them by checksum, not filename.

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
  3. Re:For a program so hard to turn off by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, you can't trust anything once a machine's compromised, which to my mind is a huge problem with modern Windows systems, but I'm not even going to go there....

    Guess where the "root" in "rootkit" comes from?

    Hint: it ain't Windows.