McAfee is not alone to do that.
In fact, Computer Associate (that bought the "PestPatrol" anti-spyware tool) does this too in its "eTrust" tool.
The culprit is PestPatrol, whose database of spyware signatures is notoriously outdated, and contains MANY false positive (including vital components of Windows XP's networking). PestPatrol has been completely left unmaintained for many months, probably because of lack of financial resources, which led to the company being sold and acquired by Computer Associates.
The false positive that harms LimeWire is caused by the way they detect KazaA (which is effectively a true spyware), but that cause almost all Gnutella servents to be disabled too (this includes not only LimeWire, but BearShare, GTKG or others too): they block the program names only because they share some common ports, or a handler for the Magnet protocol (that they disable too).
If you have recently updated your CA "eTrust" antivirus or security suite, and have discovered that it contained a new anti-spyware tool, you should better not enable it as it is directly based on the very bad PestPatrol signatures database (but keep its antivirus function active!), and use other more serious anti-spyware tools (Ad-Aware, Spybot Search&Destroy, SpywareBlaster), which in addition are free and supported by a large open community of users.
May be in some future, eTrust will become reliable, once CA will have cleaned up the old anti-spyware database. But for now this feature is still a beta for eTrust, and it will remain at this state for at least a full year. |