Mcafee loads itself when I'm not looking!

I've always been very pleased with Dell for the very reason that they don't load their computers down with installations from every vendor under the sun.  If I've mistaken this somehow, Please forgive me, however from what I can tell, It's coming from Dell.

I am in the process of upgrading about 30 computers from Windows 10, to new Windows 11 computers.  In the past, I've never had a problem with Mcafee loading itself as a driveby install - but recently, in the last 5 PCs I've done, at the start of the cloning, and the customizing of each PC with joining to Domain, and adding user, I'll run Dell Command update and tell it to restart itself.  I'll go on to other business.  20 minutes later, I'll turn around, and there is that Mcafee all loaded, and asking me about some garbage.  

How is this happening?  I've searched my base image for anything related to Mcafee and I don't see anything in apps, I don't find it on a search of the hard drive - I found one graphic of Mcaffee in Digital Delivery or something, but it's not an app, or an executable.  

My experience with McAfee is very bad.  I'd label it a virus - especially as it seems to install itself at every drive-by place it can possibly find to put itself.  If you have to hide your program so someone won't see that it's going to install itself, that's a red flag to me.  Plus my bad experiences with this software in the past.   Also, once a program loads, and injects a bunch of garbage into the registry - it's there for life.  I'm not savvy enough to know what you should, or should not delete from the registry - and I haven't been able to find any references before it loads itself anyway.  I shouldn't have to!

IS Dell changing it's past policy of not installing bloatware on new computers?  Did I somehow pick this up from someplace else?  One program we use is Foxit, and I know that program does have a half-hidden drive by install that if you don't turn it off, it will install that garbage.  But I haven't loaded Foxit on this department's PCs.

Hopefully someone has an answer.  I like to install the branded Dell install base because it has all of the Dell update programs, DCU, SupportAssist and it's tune up program.  I don't use all of them, but if I call Dell for support, they don't have to load that stuff before they can help.  However, if Dell has taken to putting this bloatware into their base image - I recently downloaded 25H2 and began using that as my new base image for cloning.  I'll be very disappointed if Dell is started doing this.

- on in Tampa