My experience of McAfee is that it's a good cose if you get the AntiVirus toolkit and not the McAfee Desktop. My experance about the desktop version is that ther is to match trubble wit the inbuilt Firewall. To complext for most normal (not poffesional) users to manage and configure.
Ther have been some problem with some dat updates like that one that indicate a virus on Windows XP sp3 on the svchost.exe (this is a system file) and deleted this file. That had the inpact that when you try to reboot the system the system hang.
But I think that almost every large antivirus companys have had somekind of problem before and probebly in the future also. So this was a bad thing that in this time happen for McAfee and probebly happen fore some one else next time.
If you not changing anyting you probebly do not get any updates.
The VirusScan 8.7i seams to bee a good one because of the good prestanda regual updates and a good possibility to tight up the system with port blocking at applikation level.
You have also possibility to lock application to get access to e.n.g. your internet explorer settings and adressboks and so on.