McAfee and System Information Problems

My laptop (Toshiba Tecra S2) was OK on Friday night when I turned it off. When I turned it on again on Saturday morning, it had developed a go slow - up to 20 minutes to respond to a mouse click. The hard drive activity light remained continuously lit - not even a flicker - for as long as the computer was turned on. During boot up, I noticed that all seemed normal until McAfee Virusscan loaded, then it ground to a near halt. I uninstalled McAfee - took 3 hours as response was so slow - and matters vastly improved, although still occasional slow spells. Reinstalled McAfee, and it slowed right down again. Uninstalled again and operating OK. As part of fault finding, I tried to look at System Info to check if it was seeing RAM, but I got the error message "Cannot access the Windows Management Instrumentation software. Windows management files may be moved or missing ". After uninstalling McAfee the second time, I ran Registry First Aid followed by Defrag. Could these have caused the problem accessing system information files? Something's causing the hard drive light to be continuously lit when McAfee is installed. After McAfee was uninstalled, the hard drive light behaved as normal - out most of the time, and lit only when actually doing something. I ran System File Checker but it showed nothing.

I wonder if the go slow and windows management problems are related, and what measures I can take to resolve both problems. I feel very vulnerable without antivirus software. Any suggestions? I'm running XP pro and all the latest updates for it and McAfee have been installed.

 

While you're waiting for a better idea, why not run some sort of RAM test to eliminate that from the mix?

There are several freebies that can help you there so take your choice:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ram+test

 

The complaint is with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), and not msinfo32.exe, the application that populates the System Information panel (although the application makes extensive use of WMI).

This could explain a slow computer.

As the for loops require a .CMD session, do yourself a favor and copy/paste the below into a new Notepad session:

;------------ start copy/paste below this line

net stop winmgmt
c:
cd %systemroot%\system32\wbem
rd /S /Q repository


regsvr32 /s %systemroot%\system32\scecli.dll
regsvr32 /s %systemroot%\system32\userenv.dll


mofcomp cimwin32.mof
mofcomp cimwin32.mfl
mofcomp rsop.mof
mofcomp rsop.mfl

for /f %%s in ('dir /b /s *.dll') do regsvr32 /s %%s
for /f %%s in ('dir /b *.mof') do mofcomp %%s
for /f %%s in ('dir /b *.mfl') do mofcomp %%s

echo DONE ..... A reboot of your computer is required now.
pause

;--------------- end copy/paste above this line

In Notepad do a File, Save as, and save the file as C:\fix_wmi.cmd

Then:

Start, Run, C:\fix_wmi.cmd

Reboot when prompted.