Removing McAfee causes error from Outlook about missing DLL.

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Removing McAfee causes error from Outlook about missing DLL.

Post by jasonb »

I recently removed McAfee from my computer at work. (I discovered that it was showing symptoms of a rootkit - per Sysinternals' RootkitRevealer - API information was being hidden / misrepresented. I replaced it with Avast! which doesn't perform any similary questionable activities.) After having done that, Outlook would always start and complain about a missing addin. Yet another example of something that doesn't uninstall properly.

Anyway. A quick Google came up with this link, which says:

Problem: After upgrading from VirusScan 4.5.1 to VirusScan Enterprise 7, Microsoft Outlook begins displaying an error message on startup that "The addin 'C:\Program Files\McAfee\VirusScan\scanemal.dll' could not be installed or loaded."

Solution: Exit Outlook. Find and delete the file EXTEND.DAT. Reopen Outlook; the problem should have gone away.

Explanation: For some reason, Outlook caches all its Registry settings in EXTEND.DAT so it doesn't have to look in the Registry. Problem is, if the Registry changes, Outlook doesn't know about it. Deleting EXTEND.DAT forces Outlook to look everything up in the Registry again.


After that, everything was fine. The location of the extend.dat file, on my system, was "C:\Documents and Settings\JBassford\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook".
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