If you work in a corporate environment, you and your computer may be the unsuspecting victim of a terrible piece of software from Symantec called Endpoint Protection. It’s a giant behemoth of a program that includes anti-spyware, anti-virus, network threat detection, and all kinds of other super security crap.
I certainly do understand the need for these programs and I use them myself, but Endpoint Protection is a resource hog of enormous proportions. On top of that, it’s almost nearly impossible to turn off or kill. Actually, I’ve tried to kill all the processes related to it and it still continues to run.
The worst part about the program is it’s need to eat up all the processor power on your computer. My computer never fell from 100% CPU usage when the program was running. I tried to uncheck the services and startup programs for it using MSCONFIG to no avail.
Finally, I tried to uninstall it and I couldn’t even do that! The program was password protected so that no sane human being could uninstall the crap! I understand that the password is there to prevent employees from uninstalling it, but if you can’t do any work because your computer is unbearably slow, then it should at least allow the uninstall and notify the administrator.
Anyway, if you are in a similar situation where you don’t know the password to uninstall Endpoint Protection, then you’ll be happy to know of a quick way to bypass the password and still uninstall the program.
When the password prompt comes up, go into Task Manager by pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and choosing Task Manager, then click on the Processes tab. Now find the msiexec.exe process and kill it!
The picture above is actually from Process Explorer, not Task Manager, but it will have the same name there also. Once you kill the process, the password prompt disappears and the uninstall continues!!
After removing the program, my computer CPU usage dropped to a normal 2%. Talk about a terrible program. If you want a really good anti-virus, go with Kaspersky. Enjoy!
there are several ways to get rid of the symantec endpoint protection. the default passwords didn’t work for me and killing the password window didnt work either as i got a new message “no password given” or something like this.
1) as i didnt care much about breaking stuff at this computer i started at first to disable the services.
run: windowskey + r > services.msc
and stop and deactivate all symantec services. one of the services can’t be stopped but that doesnt matter. (annoying windows keep popping up later, simply keep closing them.)
2) then i went to the registry and simply whiped out everything that was called “symantec”
run: windowskey +r > regedit
and delete the whole keydirectory HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > SYMANTEC
(i found out later that this disabled the password prompt, too)
3) then i rebooted using a linux live cd and simply whiped out all symantec files on my hard drive
C:\Program files\Symantec\
C:\Program files\Shared Documents\Symantec Shared\
and reboot back to windows. this did pretty much the job, but the annoying popups still kept coming (symantec was still there after whiping out almost everything)
4) now i was able to stop and deactivate the last symantec services, see 1st step.
5) finally i was able to go to system settings and to uninstall symantec without password.
if some of the steps fail, keep trying and add reboots between them. good luck.
Unfortunately this method didn’t work for me on XP. When the password window popped up it prevented me from clicking on the task manager window. Symantec probably saw this blog and made a patch.
This method worked for me:
http://andrewblock.net/2011/03/07/how-to-uninstal…