(CNET) -- McAfee's popular antivirus software failed spectacularly on Wednesday, causing tens of thousands of Windows XP computers to crash or repeatedly reboot.

A buggy update that the company released early in the day turned the software's formidable defenses against malicious software inward, prompting it to attack a vital component of Microsoft Windows. The update was available for business customers for about four hours before distribution was halted, McAfee said.

The damage was widespread: registry cleaner the University of Michigan's medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports and turned off their patrol car terminals as a precaution. Some jails canceled visitation, and Rhode Island hospitals turned away non-trauma patients at emergency rooms and postponed some elective surgeries.

Intel was also hit by McAfee's bungled update, a source inside the company confirmed to CNET. The source said that all Intel's computers inside the United States ran McAfee and many were affected registry cleaner reviews but didn't know how many or whether it impacted the company's factories.

The update released at 6 a.m. PT effectively redirected the PC's immune system, causing it to attack a legitimate operating system component known as SVCHOST.EXE in the same way that some diseases can cause the human immune system to turn inward. In this case, McAfee's application incorrectly confused it with malware known as the W32/Wecorl.a virus.

McAfee apologized to customers for the registry software problem, which seemed to affect primarily Windows XP computers running Microsoft's Service Pack 3, but downplayed its impact. "We are not aware of significant impact on consumers," the company said in a statement sent to CNET registry software reviews at 2 p.m. PT.

That didn't endear the company to the enterprise users who were the most affected by the update, especially system administrators who were forced to trek from computer to computer and manually install the repair that McAfee had made available by midday. It's not clear how many customers were affected, and a McAfee representative said she did not have an update.

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