Three times in an hour my Mcafee has stopped steam's bootstrap client from contacting me [?] and basically kicked me off skyrim.

The first time it still let my play...but in a half hour I was dumped offline about 15 minutes apart.

Mcafee sez the ip adress is in Bellevue near Seattle? Plus they seem to have no data about the address other than they gave it a red rating.

Has this happened to anyone else?

I work graves so I'm going to sleep and will check on this thread tomorrow!

Thanx and a tip o the hat.

This is why I don't use McAfee. Or Norton or any other program that thinks it knows what's best for me.

If you want to keep McAfee, then tell it to ignore Steam.

Or, turn off Real Time Monitoring.

It sounds like this is happening from the firewall side of things in McAfee. What McAfee are you using? The steam bootstrap client is the Steam client executable.

If the firewall is blocking Steam then connections cannot be made properly.

The Steam bootstrap client from contacting you? It makes outgoing connections from you. It listens to incoming connections so perhaps these are being blocked.

I would also reinstall Steam. Follow these intructions. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9609-OBMP-2526

Read everything thoroughly. Just move the Steamapps directory outside the Steam folder somewhere like in a new folder in my documents for instance.

You don't need to copy it as that will take more time. Right click and drag then select move from the drop down.

See here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2198-AGHC-7226