PortableApps in Windows XP

As of summer 2010, a portable application -- what I had been calling a "standalone" program -- was a program that did not have to be "registered" with Windows.  It might not exist on your computer at all until the moment when you would plug in a USB drive containing it, and then you could run it immediately from that drive without having to go through an installation process.  You would also thereby avoid the risk that this would be the straw that broke the camel's back -- the program that would cause Windows to crash.  Moreover, you could thus carry your toolbox around with you, and always have that particular program that you might need for some purpose.  You would also tend to be running lighter software, meaning that a netbook computer might find it easier to run.

Within the world of portable applications for Windows XP (or other operating systems), there was an actual PortableApps (PA) website.  The concept of this enterprise appeared to be that you begin by downloading and installing the PA platform, optionally with a suite of basic programs (e.g., Firefox, OpenOffice), and then you add other portable applications from their directory or elsewhere.

At about the time when I first started paying serious attention to PA, I was in the process of configuring a minimal WinXP virtual machine (VM), and wondered if this way of loading programs would help me to set up a faster and better-functioning VM.  To that end, I decided to err on the heavy side, by installing as many apps as possible on my USB drive.  I had a 4GB Kingston drive available, and if it looked promising I could always buy a larger one.  So, for now, it was a question of what I could get onto that 4GB drive.

I didn't want all of the programs that came with the PortableApps.com suites, so I just downloaded the basic platform, along with a bunch of individual apps.  I installed the basic platform in the root of the 4GB Kingston, following instructions.  It took about a minute.  Then, at the end of that installation process, I launched PA.  It seemed to disappear whenever I used the mouse or keyboard, and after each app installation was completed.  So I kept having to go back to re-run StartPortableApps.exe, there in the root of the USB drive.

To install the individual apps, I went into PA's Options > Install a New App and browsed to each of the .paf.exe (PortableApps format) applications that I had decided to install.  There wasn't a batch process option, so I had to sit there and wait through each of these installations, one by one.  I ran into a problem when I decided to delete one of them.  The problem had to do with administrative rights in Windows XP.  It took a couple of hours to sort out.

Some of these apps had multiple features.  I wasn't familiar with all of them.  It appeared likely that, as I did get to know them, others would become superfluous.  Also, many of these apps had their own additional instructions or informational webpages.  I combined them into a PDF and put a copy on the jump drive itself, for future reference.

The user could right-click on a particular app in PA to pull up a menu of options:  Run, Run as Administrator, Rename, Refresh, Hide, Show Hidden Icons, Favorite, Start Automatically, and Uninstall.  I used the last of those with Sumatra PDF, when I decided in favor of Foxit; but when I said to uninstall, I got an error message:  "Unable to uninstall %APPNAME%."  PA's instructions  said I could just use Windows Explorer to delete the item, followed by the Options > Refresh App Icons menu option in PA.

These difficulties were overshadowed by a much larger problem.  At one point, I took the jump drive out of my computer and tried running it in another computer.  That computer had a different kind of antivirus software than mine.  I think it may have been McAfee.  Whatever it was, it decided that the PortableApps platform was malware, and promptly deleted it.  Presto!  The sleek interface was gone.  The antivirus software also wiped out a couple of individual apps within the PortableApps set.

That pretty much ended my use of PortableApps.com.  Instead, I switched to a different portable applications setup, one that was not quite as slick but was much more robust.

McAfee Quarantine -- What's In There?

I discovered that McAfee VirusScan seemed to be putting large numbers of files with a .bup suffix into folders called C:\QUARANTINE and E:\Cache\McAfeeQuarantine.  (The location of the latter was no surprise; I had set aside E:\Cache for miscellaneous folders.)  I wondered what was in these .bup files; and if they were things that I did not want to be quarantined, I wondered how I might retrieve their contents.  I tried to open them by double-clicking on them, but I got this message (in Windows XP):  "Windows cannot open this file."

Apparently there was supposed to be a McAfee Quarantine Manager program.  I didn't have that.  Actually, I couldn't even tell what I did have.  Normally, I would store the installation program, in case I needed it again, but it wasn't turning up right now.  I suspected that I had gotten McAfee something-or-other installed, for free, during the installation of some other program.

A search led to a McAfee page that seemed to indicate that McAfee Quarantine Manager was a Large Enterprise product.  I registered to receive a free download of the beta version.  They said I would be getting an e-mail within a few hours, but it was actually just a few minutes, and then I downloaded Quarantine Manager.

While that was all in the works, I went to McAfee's main support page.  It did not have links to any knowledgebase, forum, or FAQs.  I clicked on the big Get Support button.  Here, I had options for Tech Support, Customer Service, or Virus Removal.  I chose Tech Support, and that did give me a link to FAQs.  I tried a search there and got several items that seemed relevant.  One, document no. TS100617, "How to recover a file that has been quarantined by VirusScan," advised me to begin by double-clicking the M icon in my taskbar.  I didn't have an M icon; I just had a shield whose tooltip said, "McAfee OAS: enabled."  I double-clicked on it anyway and got "On-Access Site Scan Statistics."  It had no options.  This was different from the picture shown in the document, which showed a screenshot from McAfee Security Center.  Another document, no. TS100843, "How to recover a file that has been quarantined by VirusScan," likewise assumed I had an M icon.

Taking another approach, I tried McAfee's Chat and Email support option.  I started with the Community Forums link, which oddly appeared on that webpage even though a forum is neither chat nor e-mail.  It seemed that I could have gone directly to the forums, if I had had the URL, instead of going through all those other pages.  Once I was there, at any rate, my searches didn't turn up anything on point, so I backed up and tried their free online chat.  I sent them a message.  They replied immediately with this:

Sorry, we don't support your operating system
We currently support Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, NT 4.0 and Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger or newer.

I was using Ubuntu to send this message.  So I guess it did not occur to McAfee that someone might use one computer to contact them about a problem on another.  I went into a Windows XP virtual machine on that Ubuntu computer and tried again; but then the web browser I was using (Firefox) crashed there.

While that was developing, I did a search for McAfee Security Center.  This seemed to be a product, or rather part of another product, that I could buy for about $35-50.  I also did a search for the On-Access Site Scan.  Michael Dance at eHow.com said OAS was a key part of McAfee VirusScan.  My search for that generated the impression that I could download VirusScan and use it free for the first year.  Unfortunately, it seemed that that particular promotion had been active in autumn 2009, whereas it was now summer 2010.

At about this time, it occurred to me that I could check Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs and see what, exactly, I did have.  And well, lo and behold, it seemed I had McAfee Agent, McAfee AntiSpyware Enterprise, and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise.  No shortcuts to anything like that in my Start Menu, though.  I went into C:\Program Files and didn't see much; but then I noticed that there was a newish C:\Program Files(x86) folder whose only contents were a McAfee folder.  There, in a VirusScan Enterprise subfolder, I found 22 Application-type (i.e., .exe) files.  I tried double-clicking on mcadmin.exe, but nothing happened.  I tried mcconsol.exe, and that opened the VirusScan Console that I had been able to open by right-clicking the shield icon in the taskbar; but that Console still didn't have any more relevant options than it had had earlier in the day, and most specifically it seemed useless for purposes of finding out what was in those .bup files in McAfeeQuarantine.  I clicked on most of the other executables in that VirusScan Enterprise subfolder and still got nothing.  Nor did a search for files or folders with McAfee in their name turn up anything interesting.  Somehow, it seemed, I had gotten a sort of ghost version of McAfee VirusScan on my PC.

I decided to move the .bup files from C:\Quarantine to E:\Cache\McAfeeQuarantine, so they would all be in one place.  While I appreciated whatever it was that the installed free version of McAfee AntiVirus might be doing on my behalf -- especially an Enterprise version (woo hoo!) -- I was mostly just wanting to get rid of it if I could replace it with something else, not necessarily by McAfee.  I was, in fact, running avast! AntiVirus, and avast! was in fact running a one-year free special.  Anyway, neither was top-ranked, according to TopTenReviews.  The only PC Magazine editor's choice antivirus award in 2010 went to Panda Cloud 1.1 (free).  So really, all I needed was to investigate what was in these .bup files and then bid avast! to McAfee.

By now, McAfee online chat was finally ready for action.  The only place it would run for me, even in the Windows XP virtual machine, was in Internet Explorer; it didn't run in Firefox, and it had to install several different programs before its chat interface would run.  Even then, it was just sitting there, with this message:  "Your representative has arrived.  Thank you for waiting."  I was glad s/he had arrived, but I couldn't tell where s/he was, exactly.  After a while, I killed that window and tried again, and now it worked.  I proceeded to spend a half-hour chatting with Deepu, who had no idea how to view the contents of .bup files.  She was not able to verify my installation, which was what I told her -- that I really didn't recall how this program had gotten onto my system -- and therefore she would not pass the question on to her supervisor.

A couple of days passed, and no more word from McAfee.  By now, that free download of McAfee Quarantine Manager seemed to be the only game in town.  Therefore, I went ahead and tried to install one of the programs included in the download.  But I got, "The operating system is not adequate for running McAfee Quarantine Manager DBSuite."  Same thing when I tried the more modest version:  "The operating system is not adequate for running McAfee Quarantine Manager."  They hadn't warned me about this over at eHow.com.

I never did hear anything more from McAfee.  Basically, they had put several gigabytes of stuff from my computer into their .bup files; they were not going to help me figure out what was in those files; and if I was worried that they might have stuck some data in there along with allegedly infected program files (some of which, I had concluded, were false positives, i.e., guilty until proven innocent).  I had had a prior crappy experience with McAfee, back in the 1990s, and this was probably going to be the end for them, as far as I was concerned.