Troubleshoot Symantec Endpoint Protection on Windows 7 and Vista

Recently, I ran into an issue on a Windows 7 test box when trying to install Symantec Endpoint Protection 11. Basically, in the middle of the install, I get the following error message:

The wizard was interrupted before Symantec Endpoint Protection could be completely installed.

Fabulous! And thanks for the extra useful information to help diagnose the problem. I decided to check out the event log and found this less useful description:

Product: Symantec Endpoint Protection – Installation operation failed. Installation success or error status: 1603:Fatal error during installation.

What the heck is error code 1603? No idea, but did a little research to find out that it’s a fatal error that causes a full roll back. So how can you fix this issue? Well, it depends. If you are running Windows 7, try out the following steps:

1. Extract the MR4 files to your computer and run the lusetup.exe file from the SEP folder.

2. Restart your computer and then run setup.exe from the same folder.

3. Make sure you choose Custom Setup and then only choose the Antivirus and Antispyware Protection. Restart your computer.

Unfortunately, you can’t install the Proactive Threat Protection and the Network Threat Protection features on Windows 7. Once I did the installation without those two options, everything worked fine.

If you are on Windows Vista or if the Symantec installation has gone totally crazy, you might have to use CleanWipe to uninstall Symantec Endpoint Protection. It’s a very useful utility for completely remove all Symantec Antivirus and Endpoint Protection software.

Now that your system is cleansed of Symantec, you can try the install again on Vista.

As a last resort, you can manually uninstall Symantec using the following steps at this link:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ent-security.nsf/docid/2007073018014248

Hopefully that solves someone else’s problem with installing Symantec Endpoint Protection on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. If you have any problems, etc, post a comment! Enjoy!