McAfee Troubles
It all started when McAfee installed a major overhaul as an update. I was initially excited because of the new tools and configurations at my disposal, but soon realized that McAfee had decided to do many things for me (without my knowledge) and this turned out to be a problem for me.
As you may know, my Xbox 360 is connected to my computer via a crossover cable; this way, I have wireless Internet for my 360 without purchasing the $100 Wireless Network Adapter for the Xbox 360. (I connect via my laptop because there is a slight issue with the Mac’s throughput which causes some games on Xbox Live to lag, and this annoyance can become a real problem, but I haven’t sorted out exactly what the issue is [my guess is just a hardware conflict between Microsoft and Apple, I might install BootCamp to get avoid the problem altogether].)
Due to the nature of my setup, McAfee decides to block all Internet access on my computer (and, consequently, the 360) when I switch the 360 on (because one of the first things that the 360 checks when it boots is the network connection). My first thoughts were simply to disable the McAfee firewall, and all would be well; however, this didn’t work. I later decided to completely uninstall the McAfee firewall (after discovering the only way to uninstall any McAfee components is via the Add/Remove Programs option in the Control Panel), which still yielded no results. After a couple hours of frustration, I found that a McAfee process which runs in the background — “emproxy.exe” — was the culprit. Opening the Task Manager and ending the “emproxy.exe” process allows my 360 and laptop both Internet access freely, and I am still protected through McAfee’s other utilities. Unfortunately, this program is opened whenever McAfee opens (so if you restart your computer and have McAfee on startup, which you should, then the program will open again). It is somewhat inconvenient to have to CTRL+ALT+DEL the “emproxy.exe” process each time you boot your computer, but at least you no longer have to compromise your computer’s security in order to play Xbox.
Happy terminating!