text: when is mcafee protecting my computer? when mcafee starts up on my pc i get a box saying "mcaffee activeshiels is running and protecting your computer" with an ok botton to click. when i click on the ok mcafee seems to go away. what should i do to be sure it is protecting my pc? mcafee like most virus scanners should have a small icon in the system tray that shows if it's active, usually it's red if everything is active and running fine and black if something's not active. if you don't have this icon in the system tray (bottom right of the screen) then you may want to check your running processes by pressing "ctrl + alt + del" once and looking for the mcafee processes under the processes tab. if it's not there then you may want to try reinstalling the virus scanner by uninstalling it completly and then installing it again.  note: i can't remember the exact names of the mcafee's processes so i'm sorry i can't be more specific, i use to use mcafee and never had any problems and i personnaly think it's a good app.  hacker