CA eTrust anti-Virus won't uninstall

Question

Today I went by a friend's house to help her speed up her computer. When I got there it was as slow as any I have seen in 24 years. She has a 2 year old Dell desktop (does E320 sound right) running XP, current on updates. The machine evidently came with CA's eTrust suite of firewall, anti-spyware, anti-virus, and something else. The subscription expired early this month and she wants to try other products. Knowing that CA is not the greatest software company around I said I'd help her get it off the machine and go with AVG, Win Defender, and use Windows firewall for now.

I went to add/remove, found the entry and selected it. Got a list of the 4 products there and checked all but the firewall (I thought we might leave it in there to see how it did). The uninstall process started and pretty much died on the spot. Nothing happening on screen, no disk activity. Time passed and I gave up on it, so CTL/ALT/DEL and killed everything, then rebooted. AV & Firewall started up, so back to add/delete. I found the entry for these programs and clicked the delete button again. This time add/delete said the program was not there and gave me the option to remove program from list--nothing else was possible except to remove the entry from the display. So I did. Reboot. AV & Firewall restarted, complaining about how they were expired. So I went to Windows Defender Software Explorer and "disabled" the 4 entries, which showed as being entries in Registry. Reboot, back come the stubborn programs.

I'm not inclined to try to guess how to remove this from the registry & everywhere else manually. Went to CA's site, but really wasn't able to find any useful discussion board or forum. My friend is looking around to see if she can find a CD for this, I thought I might need to reinstall programs so I can remove them. What I'd like is something like the Symantec Norton Software Removal Tool, but I am not holding my breath.

Any ideas? The problem is that AVG won't install while these programs (at least the AV component) are there.

joe53 · Answer

Perhaps this is what you are looking for: http://crm.my-etrust.com/login.asp?username=guest&target=DOCUMENT&openparameter=3125   Let us know if it works.

wttomlinson · Answer

Would there be any problem running this in Safe Mode?  I am hoping this would help speed up the machine if as many background processes & services as possible are not active.

wttomlinson · Answer

Well now, we have another problem. That link looks good and legitimate but when I click to download the program I recieve an error message page with the text

"

An error has occurred: null : generated by notifyWhenSSExeRunning

"

I will pursue that with them. In the meantime, any thoughts on a Plan B?

joe53 · Answer

As far as the notifyWhenSSExeRunning error, goes the link below suggests that using a different browser to download the uninstaller worked for 2 respondents:
http://homeofficeforum.ca.com/homeofficeforum/posts/list/50.page

That link may contain other suggestions that might help you in uninstalling.

I'm sorry I can't answer your Safe Mode question, as I don't use eTrust.

wttomlinson · Answer

I'm getting exactly the same message with IE and Firefox both when I click the "click here" link. I am running Vista SP1 on newish Dell Inspiron 1525.

XP may do better, but that computer is in the trunk of the Sebring and I'm not that curious right now.

wttomlinson · Answer

Joe,

Thanks for looking into this for me. I have abandoned any attempt to contact CA on this matter. It appears this software came from RoadRunner not Dell--they still offer it as a free "benefit" of being one of their customers. I'll pass.

Here is what I did. In SAFE mode, I did a Restore to a state before I made any changes to the subject computer. This had the effect of returning the installed programs list in the Registry to the condition prior to my attempted removal. I then started the removal again and at least got antivirus and firewall completely removed. The removal failed at this point, but upon reboot to normal mode these components did not load. I was eventually able to reactivate the Windows firewall in the XP security center. AVG antivirus will not install itself in Safe mode (this seems to one of the last things it checks after extracting & verifying all components), but I was able to download & run SpyBot (50+ items found, mostly tracking cookies) and MS Live online antivirus (nothing found) in SAFE mode. Restarting normally, I was eventually able to get AVG to install and run a scan. It found 24 virus items and neutralized them all. At end of day, this computer seemed to be working normally--programs loaded, utilities ran, IE accessed a variety of sites. There are other problems on this machine beyond the scope of this thread.

I will check the link to see if it will help me put down the CA anti-spam and anti-spyware elements which do still exist in some form on that computer. At one point one of these popped up to tell me it had expiredand I was able to get to an options screen and check the box "don't load at startup".

Hope this helps anyone looking for help with a similar problem.

Regards,

Tom

joe53 · Answer

Tom:

Glad to hear you are sorting things out.

If I read you correctly, it appears your problem arose with Etrust software you obtained from your ISP (Roadrunner). If true, you might want to contact RoadRunner for any lingering uninstall problems.

I have always believed one should never trust computer security to software from one's ISP, even if free. You never know how the ISP might have altered the software for their own purposes, which could result in problems. Solutions from the original software vendor might not apply to the ISP-branded software.

Good luck!

wttomlinson · Answer

Joe,

This should be my last post to this thread, unless it generates some interest on its own.

You found a great page at CA (which I have sent to my friend to use) containing links to removal programs for the software she wants to delete, but when I clicked the link to download the removal programs I got an error message. That was with my new Inspiron 1525, Vista SP1. Same thing running the current version of IE and the current version of Firefox.

Last night I had to go down to my desk to do something online, and then I tried the link again. It worked! That was a Dell Dim 8300 running Win XP home, SP2. I don't remember which browser I used for that. Tonight I'm using the IBM Thinkpad T43 laptop running XP Pro, and when I click the problematic link in IE 7 it opens just fine and the download gets ready to start. Try same thing in Firefox and it pops open the window to save or not--just what you would expect.

So what it looks like is:

Vista OS    Inspiron laptop.....failure
XP Pro       IBM Thinkpad........success
XP Home   Dimension desktop...success

So is it the different Windows that control this, or is there something not quite right with the new Dell laptop?

This is an interesting question. I'd sure like to have more data from different combinations of OS and computer.

Regards,

Tom

Virus & Spyware

CA eTrust anti-Virus won't uninstall

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