Startup issue "missing file"

[midnightflyer101]

Morning All, On startup the puter will post with the hp screen and then the windows 98 screen andthen a black DOS screen that says, cannot find device file,windows registry or sys.ini file refers to this device file file no longer exists, file it seems to be looking for, C:\PROGRA"1\MCAFEE\MCAFEE"1\CYBERKRN.VXD,
As you can see it's to do with mcafee, I bought a new virus scan to update the old one and after the install this started to happen. The puter will allow me to pass this screen by hitting any key and goes on to finish loading as normal. any thoughts on how to elimanate this aggravation would be of great interest. Thanks...Terry
PS: This puter is to be retired shortly and the new build to take its place have Norton on the new one and so far think Norton is hands down the better way to go. Just my opinion.

[Dan]

if you have your AV set to start automatically at startup, you may be able to fix this by disabling it in msconfig (start>run> type msconfig> ok....click on the startup tab and uncheck it in the list)
if not, you may have to contact McAffee to see if the file is downloadable. one last thing you could try is to reinstall the original program over the top...although I would do this only as a last resort.

[reboot]

It's the typical McAfee startup screwup.
It stems from a DOS memory scan that McAfee seems to insist on doing, before the computer even loads windows. It's useless, and redundant, and as you've found out, works once, and then seems to remove or rename the file it's looking for, so the message appears.
Edit the autoexec.bat (it may be in config.sys) and remove that line completely. It's redundant and useless and is such a common issue. McAfee seem to have no intentions of resolving this problem.