How to Uninstall McAfee Legacy Programs

A McAfee legacy program is a small built-in component (file) of the McAfee antivirus or other McAfee programs. Being an integrated component, the legacy program gets automatically installed on your computer when you install the intended McAfee program. The legacy program often interferes with other applications running on your computer, hampers the internet connectivity, or downloads and installs other programs without your consent. Since it is understood that you have already decided to remove the program from your computer, let’s get started. The below mentioned self-help guide will allow your to get rid of the desired program without facing any problem.

Instructions:

First, ensure that you have uninstalled all the desired McAfee programs from your computer using the standard procedure. This essentially means clicking on the Start menu, going into the Control Panel, and using the Add or Remove Programs utility.

Open your internet browser viz. Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox etc., and go to McAfee’s official website.

Click on the Downloads link, log into your account (if prompted) and then download McAfee’s removal tool (the MCPR.exe or VSCleanupTool.exe). Save the file to a location in your computer where it is easily accessible from.

When done, locate the file, double click on it and run. The program will automatically start removing all the hidden McAfee legacy programs from your computer. Wait until the process finishes, be patient. Do not press any key while the removal is in progress or turn off your PC. Doing so may not let these programs be fully removed from your PC.

When done, click on the Yes button or whatever option you see there to proceed and let the computer reboot. When the computer has restarted, locate the file named as ‘mccleanup.log’ (it might be there on your desktop or you can search for it using the Windows Search utility), right click on it and select Delete from the dropdown menu. This will completely remove the legacy program(s) from your computer. If you want, go to the Recycle Bin and delete it from there also. You can also contact your McAfee help & support service, give them the log details of the file (before removing these), and confirm that it has been totally removed from your system.