Uninstalling McAfee VirusScan breaks IP stack on network adapter

[Patrick Hagen]

This is an email I sent to McAfee email support. I
thought I'd cross post it here in case anyone else had a
similar experience.

I am a reseller/consultant. I've had this same problem on
five workstations at two clients over the past year. In
all cases Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition was the
operating system. The hardware varied and included two
laptops and three desktops.

Upon uninstalling VirusScan 2004 (v. 8.0) and rebooting, I
am no longer able to use the IP protocol for my network
adapter. I can ping (ICMP protocol) any numerical address
on the local subnet however, when the system replies from
an address, the numerical address is returned with garbage
characters. If the adapter is configured for DHCP, then I
am unable to obtain an address lease. I can manually
release the address. However, if I attempt to obtain a
lease Windows returns the error:

An error occurred while renewing interface Local Area
Connection. An operation was attempted on something that
is not a socket.

I have tried the following:

- Removed the network adapter drivers as well as the
phycial hardware itself (or disabling the interface in
BIOS). Reboot. Reboot again without the hardware.
Install (or enable) hardware and driver.

- Used "netsh int ip reset" to reset the ip stack on the
interface.

- Reinstalled VirusScan.

- Installed newer version of VirusScan.

Finally, I had to use a Windows Restore Point, when
available. The network interface is restored to working
order, but the anti-virus software is broken (obviously).

 

[Lance]

Perhaps this:
Lance
*****

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 811259
How to determine and recover from Winsock2 corruption
<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;811259&Product=winxp>

Patrick Hagen said the following on 9/1/2004 11:31 AM:

am unable to obtain an address lease. I can manually
release the address. However, if I attempt to obtain a
lease Windows returns the error:

An error occurred while renewing interface Local Area
Connection. An operation was attempted on something that
is not a socket.

<snip>