Classic Shell: Forum

A friend bought a laptop with Windows 8 (as opposed to 8.1) installed, and also bought a subscription to McAfee Live Safe security package which was installed by the shop that sold him the laptop. When I installed Classic Shell to put back the "missing" start button, RibbonDisabler and SkipMetroSuite, we noticed that Live Safe was no longer installed. Since he was not provided with an install disc for it and there did not seem to be a way to reinstall it using the serial key that he had been supplied with, he took it back to the shop and got them to reinstall it.

They told him that they were aware of a number of PCs that had experienced the same symptom: a problem with Life Safe and Classic Shell coexisting. He asked them to remove Classic Shell and everything has been OK since then.

I don't see any Google matches for "Classic Shell Life Safe" or any threads in this forum. So was the shop telling him the truth or was there another issue.

Do you suspect that somehow installing Classic Shell uninstalled Live Safe? That's unlikely. Classic Shell does not uninstall any software.

Software can't just disappear from a computer. Most likely it was uninstalled either manually or by a restore checkpoint. I don't think any of these can be done without the user knowledge.

Also Classic Shell 3.6.3 is quite old version (about a year old). The latest one is 4.0.2.

Yes I find it hard to believe that installing Classic Shell would somehow uninstall McAfee. I can imagine that one program could remove registry keys that another had created, making it appear that the program had been removed. But it would be incredibly bad manners to do so.

Are there any disadvantages with later versions of Classic Shell? I'm sure I remember in the dim and distant past reading a magazine review or a forum posting which said that some of the features of Classic Shell which restored a Windows 7-like UI to Windows 8 had been removed in a later version (it was hinted that this was at Microsoft's request!) so I've been a bit cautious about using a newer version - probably unnecessarily cautious.

The main feature that was removed (and that got some people upset), is that the logo was changed because Microsoft complained that used their color scheme. So the default start button image is different. You can still get the original image (and more buttons) from here: viewforum.php?f=18