Have to say that I've had relatively few hassles with McAfee over the years. Some people swear by Norton, but it seems like more people swear AT it!
I use McA's Internet Security suite (FW* + AV + other bits) on the 98SE gateway and McAfee's VirusScan AV on the XP client and the only problems have been small ones. I don't worry too much about the Linux box apart from keeping open ports to a minimum.
DR-Fetcher may (?) be a component of Gator which was embedded in AudioGalaxy, see stuff about Gator at
http://www.cexx.org/gator.htm
*getting the FW properly configured is a bit tedious