BSOD Restart Loop- mferfpk.sys (full error in text)

Hi everyone,

First, I have to apologize for this post being a little bit slim. I helped a friend of my grandmothers upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 yesterday (she is one of those people who really likes new technology) and it went very well, at first. It all installed fine, accounts were all read and worked fine, we used it for about 20 minutes. I have learned to never leave someone with new software without restarting the computer to make sure it is all working fine.

That's where this crash was. The Windows logo appeared, with the little loading circle under it. It then went to a black screen (which is all normal in my experience, but very fast). The black screen stayed. And stayed. About 10 seconds later the mouse pointer appeared, and I could move it around, but the screen was still black. Then the BSOD appeared.

The full error code was: driver_irql_not_less_or_equal (mfewfpk.sys).

It then proceeded to restart. And get caught by the same crash again.

And it restarted a third time. And if finally brought me to a place where I could start it in safe mode. I used my phone to look up the error- this apparently had happened in Windows 8 as well, and is a problem with a McAfee security driver. I found the driver in question, and deleted it. The crash stopped after I did that.

Driver location for others having this issue: C:/Windows/System32/drivers

I am posting this here for a few reasons. First, I want to know if anyone else has had this error, and if you have found a better way of fixing it that totally removing the driver.

Second, I want to know if this is a McAfee problem, or a not-updated McAfee problem. My friend had stopped using McAfee years ago, and had uninstalled it, but as I have learned in the past "uninstalling" McAfee from the control panel in Win7 doesn't actually uninstall it. It just removes the bulky files and leaves all the drivers. Could it be that because it had remained not updated for so long, the out of date driver caused the crash?

That brings me to my next question- all of my computers run McAfee, and I actually am really interested in upgrading to Win10. It looks great, and I loved the few minutes of playing around with it. But, will it conflict with my security software? Will this crash happen even with an up to date version of McAfee?

I know this forum is for Windows 10- if you guys don't have answers, that's fine. I wanted to post this somewhere so that the solution that worked for me would be out there in case other people have the same problem. But, maybe you'll all know.

I do have one other somewhat related question. How does one easily get to the option to boot into safe mode with Windows 10? I could not for the life of me figure it out. Is there no pre-startup button? Is the only option to just let it crash (or force it to) until it decides you're ready for safe mode?

Thanks!