I'm writing up this experience in case someone gets caught in the same thing and is Googling for answers. It took me many hours and unnecessary expense to come to this point.
Sunday morning around 07:30 I saw that my McAfee Security Center subscriptiong had expired. I logged in to my account, charged another year on my credit card, and began download the new version. During the download McAfee detected an earlier version which I instructed to uninstall. I went into Control Panel, uninstalled version 6 of the privacy service and spam killer, and the download continued. I completed the install and when completed, I lost my connectivity. I rebooted and got a error window that it could not find SPORDER.dll which it indicated was needed by iTunesHelper.exe and installing this DLL was recommended. I clicked okay and spent a good 8 hours the rest of Sunday dealing with five different Comcast techs and three McAfee techs. You can only chat with a McAfee tech for free. At one point I even spent $3.99 a minute with a McAfee tech rep who must have been in India. Each ran through her/his diagnostics. The first three Comcast reps told me it was McAfee; McAfee reps told me it was my ISP.
My PC showed that the COM connection to the cable modem was not working. It showed up in the lower right hand tray. I have a modem and wireless router as well. So I had two icons in the tray with Xs. Each of many times i did an IPCONFIG it gave an IP number that Comcast reps said indicated I was not acquiring a good IP number. This went on for hours and hours. One interesting thing was that the two laptops we had were able to access our wireless router which have secured properly. So the desktop was dead in the water but the laptops were getting wireless from the Comcast connection.
We also ran the ethernet cable to the PC laptop and replicated the problem there. So, troubleshooting led me to think the only common thing was the cable modem. Faulty thinking I'm afraid, as I now a new cable modem that I don't need. At 5:30 I Googled the DLL file, downloaded a copy and installed it in the windows/system32. And, voila, I had connectivity again. From what I read, that DLL is related to aps that look for spyware and when I uninstalled
the two McAfee programs, one deleted it and disabled my cable connection to the desktop PC. Too bad no one at Comcast thought about that. Looking at forum discussions I found from Googling SPORDER.DLL other McAfee users ran into the same problem.
You'd that ended it but when I re-booted another DLL showed up, this one also pointing to iTunes and to Skype. From Googling that one, it appeared I needed to buy an ap and I bought RegistrySmart. While I think it did some good finding things that didn't belong on my computer, inspite of the three other aps I have for flagging spam and spyware, it didn't fix the McRtl32.dll and I could not find anywhere to download one.
I initiated a new chat session today with McAfee and the end result was to uninstall all of my new McAfee and then reinstall it. Makes me anxious not having that firewall running all the time, but once done and installed the McRtl32.dll error message did not appear. On Sunday I wanted to uninstall and re-install McAfee but since I didn't have an internet connection I could not
do it. Uninstalling would not have restored for SPORDER.dll file. What a mess.
Hopefully if you are reading this, it will help save you approximately 12 hours I spent on this.
Thanks for your blog. I ran into the same problem and hit the roof. Luckily, I found you blog and "viola, I had connectivity again." I appreciate the blog and help.