Internet Explorer or Services.msc problems after McAfee Uninstall

Written by Sam McGeown

Published on 2/7/2009 - Read in about 2 min (353 words)

#Anti-virus #Security #Windows

I’m in the middle of rolling out Sophos as a replacement to the incumbent McAfee at work. One interesting thing that I found as I rolled out to some test users was that they were unable to log on to one of our internal systems using NTLM (integrated authentication). Instantly the roll out of Sophos was blamed - and I can understand why - the problem did not occur until Sophos was installed.

But the truth is that in it’s dying breath McAfee had one last laugh and had un-registered jscript.dll and vbscript.dll. I can say that now because I’ve spent a morning with Sophos support and been on the brink of abandoning our roll-out until I looked into one of the side symptoms.

Sophos was ruled out as the cause because a) it did not effect ALL the Sophos test machines, just ones where McAfee was uninstalled b) with Sophos disabled (services and browser add on) the problem did not go away c) Uninstalling Sophos did not solve the problem. It did however, point me in the right direction - during the uninstall there was an error message, the fix for which was to re-register jscript.dll (clue #1)

When I opened Services.msc, the Extended view simply showed a blue frame - Standard view was fine. One of the fixes for this was to re-register jscript.dll and vbscript.dll (clue #2).

Clue #3 came when I googled McAfee and jscript.dll, rather than blaming it on Sophos. A myriad of pleas for help from McAfee users with stuffed browsers, update issues and the like.

The Solution 

• Download and run the McAfee Consumer Product Removal tool (http://service.mcafee.com/FAQDocument.aspx?lc=2057&id=TS100507)
• Reboot if required
• Open a command prompt (Start > Run > “cmd”)
• Type the following commands in one at a time, hit enter and acknowledge the result
  • Regsvr32.dll jscript.dll
  • Regsvr32 vbscript.dll
• Reboot again

Now, let me take this opportunity to say that McAfee is a resource hogging, trouble making screwed up piece of software which I pray to God that I never have to support again.  

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