Tired of dealing with all the crap that the Symantec (Norton) Antivirus software installed on my Windows XP-based laptop, I recently replaced it with Network Associates’ McAfee VirusScan. After installing it, it seemed a much less pesky product overall and I was happy with that.

Recently however, my laptop started bluescreening on a frequent, then regular basis. I finally got around to diagnosing the problem. Turns out the filter driver (naiavf5x.sys) that’s part of VirusScan is crashing my system. Argh! There seems no way around the problem other than to disable the virus scanner, and so now I’m left searching for a new solution. What a waste of time and money!