May 2019 updates for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 don't play nice with McAfee or Soph

[harlan4096]

It seems that the saying "history repeats itself" is true, at least when it comes to Microsoft patches. Microsoft released updates for all supported versions of Windows -- client and server -- on the May 2019 Patch Day.

We covered the updates in our monthly security updates overview for Windows. Microsoft confirmed two issue: an update might be installed twice on affected systems, and some UK government sites were not accessible in Internet Explorer 11 or Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft added gov.uk to the list of HTTP Strict Transport Security Top Level Domains, and that caused issues for government sites that did not support it.

Things looked better compared to last month. Several Enterprise-focused security products did not play nicely with last month's updates for Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and the Server variants.

Security companies Sophos, Avast, Avira, ArcaBit and McAfee acknowledged issues with last month's updates. Machines would not boot into Windows anymore and appeared frozen or locked on startup.

Patch notes suggest that the issues are fixed. The monthly rollup patch KB4493472 for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 states that the issues with security software has been resolved and that Microsoft removed the temporary update block as a consequence.

Fast forward to May 2019. If you check the known issues of the monthly rollup patch KB4499164 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you may have a deja vu when you go through the known issues.

A new issue, added on May 18, 2019 suggests that systems with McAfee security products installed may freeze, hang or start very slowly after update installation.

Microsoft and McAfee have identified an issue on devices with McAfee Endpoint Security (ENS) Threat Prevention 10.x or McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention (Host IPS) 8.0 or McAfee VirusScan Enterprise (VSE) 8.8 installed. It may cause the system to have slow startup or become unresponsive at restart after installing this update.

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