Let's install McAfee

I file this one under "woes of an IT Professional serving the public"...

it's more PEBKAC than anything else.

So, as some of you may know, I work on the phones, doing remote support for an ISP in the eastern united states. Yesterday, I got a call from a customer who was having some issues getting, and staying, connected.

It was a strange issue, since the customer had no issues getting to most webpages, but couldn't load either of the two he needed to connect his computer to me, even in safe mode (with networking).... I decided, after about 45 minutes, to ask him to uninstall his Antivirus (McAfee). I also inquired about having something installed prior, and he mentioned he had McAfee before, but 'removed' it for the new version. Well, uninstalling worked, long story short, his 'removal' of his previous version wasn't complete, it failed or crashed or didn't complete for some reason, and he still had some of the firewalls from the old version.

I EXPLAINED THIS TO HIM.

We have a tool... the filename is MCPR.exe and it's the McAfee removal tool (there's a similar one for AVG and another for Norton). This tool removes any and all McAfee software from your computer. I was going to use it to uninstall the broken version, but first, wanted to download the installer to get the current version re-added to the system when I'm done. I asked the customer to log into the website where we download it, and he did, and when clicking on the download link, it came up with "error 31", which is something we see sometimes. "We" have a support department that can specifically handle error 31 with a significant amount of ease, and presuming the customer can get in touch with them in a timely fashion, we can have the error resolve in a matter of minutes.

So I send him off, and finish up some of the other work I had to do on his system, and take another call, and I'm working on other peoples computers... by the time I get back to his screen, HES INSTALLING MCAFEE AGAIN.

Yes, let's reinstall a problematic software, so we can run the removal for another piece of software that will just so happen to completely wipe out exactly what you're doing.

and he was all happy about it too, he typed into our support chat "only 7 minutes left!"
I was like.... no, we can't do this, I havn't run the removal. I asked you to resolve the error 31, not reinstall the application.

I immediately cancelled the install, shut it down and started the removal tool.
After that, reboot, got him to re-login to the download page, and re-downloaded and re-re-installed the application.

The system now works as intended... however, there seems to be an issue somewhere on Layer 8.