Shoutbox

I can confirm you that there is absolutely no trojan or key logger in the sponsor program. You can look at it this way: the sponsor is here to generate a revenue and the only way to generate a revenue is through ads so there's no point in doing anything else than displaying popups. What was downloading may simply have been the sponsor program installing itself.

McAfee, like other similar products, likes to detect a lot of things as "critical" items to justify its presence on your system. You said it yourself: disabling it during the installation of the sponsor showed no problem and after it was restarted, it warned you about lots of things.

Time has taught me that it is a useless battle to fight so I'm sorry but that's all there is to it. I distribute an adware program and it's being detected as one of the worst trojan possible while so many other real threats are left undetected (precisely because threats usually do their best not to be detected at all to do their nasty business).