McAfee for Mac is worse than what it protects against!

McAfee crippled my iMac/Snow Leopard.  It spawns multiple copies of VShieldScan and other VShield processes, even when every "feature" of McAfee is supposedly turned off and no protection is being offered.  Every few hours of use, the Finder just dies, requiring a power down.

Cox will send you to McAfee for support.  McAfee told me on my first call to give them control of my machine so that they could search for conflicts, did their scan, but found no conflicts.  Then they refused further support when the Cox "Order ID" for the software showed up as expired.  On the next McAfee call, this time to the correct "Cox" support number, I was told in no uncertain terms that the VShield processes had nothing to do with McAfee software.  Do a Google search on VShield and see how obviously wrong that McAfee support statement was.  

When I ran the McAfee uninstall while watching my process monitor, the VShield processes all went away, and now my Mac is back!  It feels like the lightening fast machine it was before I first installed McAfee.

The McAfee software is horribly unsuitable for use on my Mac, and I am shocked that Cox would offer such crippling software to its users.  

However, if you believe you may have malware on your Mac,  I suggest you install this Cox McAfee Security Suite, and let it do a full scan.  It can take a whole day to complete, and you may need one or more restarts to get it to complete.  Once it has done its job, then run the McAfee uninstaller before using your Mac again.  

McAfee did find malware on my machine that downloaded with a fake Flash upgrade, but had never executed because I refused to allow it to run.  McAfee was able to clear this trash off my main disk, but it could not remove it from my TimeMachine backup.  However, using SuperDuper to clone my TimeMachine from one disk to another, while McAfee was running, did allow McAfee to remove the trash.  That copy, which should have taken a couple of hours, took 26 hours to run while McAfee was running!  In other words, McAfee is capable of finding malware, but is incapable of coexisting with a Mac.