Removing McAfee Security Center

[tonyd]

Seems McAfee is catching up with Norton in the 'Difficult to Remove' department. I was at someone's house where they tried to remove McAfee Security Center.

He used Add/Remove Control Panel. When trying to remove McAfee Security Center, it said to remove all the other components first. So we did that. However, after removing all the components that we could see in the Add/Remove list, we still couldn't remove McAfee Securty Center because it was still saying that we needed to removed all the components first.

Ran JV16 registry cleaner - still had same problem. Ended up turning off the 3 McAfee entries in msconfig/startup for now. That worked.

-td

[mylanta]

I remember one time almost disecting the damn thing by opening folder and deleting files one by one in safe mode to get rid of it.

[photolady]

Ended up turning off the 3 McAfee entries in msconfig/startup for now. That is the first thing to do when trying to remove McAfee or Norton. Turning off startup items causes less pain in the neck when removing these programs.
Make sure all folders left behind are removed also.

[dbarrow]

The problem occurs with many things that run as background SERVICES.
AV, firewall, adblockers ... and all that other stuff we need, integrates very deeply in the OS as it has to establish very low level 'hooks'. They often include themselves in the SERVICES running at startup.

You often have trouble deleting anything (without a good uninstaller) as the running service locks certain files.

One of the best tricks I have found for installing/un-installing is to use the Administrator account.
I keep that profile pared down to the barest essentials with little in startup and many services disabled. That way, when you logon as Administrator, there is little or nothing running in the background to block your path or conflict.

If you INSTALL from Administrator, install for all users, then go back into startup/msconfig and disable any startup items installed under Administrator.

Safe Mode does not load all these drivers, but it often will not let you un-install or install from it.

Copylock, which I posted a while back, is a reliable tool to unlock files for deletion. I have used that for a few files that were locked by system applications and it works!

Sometimes, the UNINSTALL menu in JV16 will rid you of stubborn things that refuse to leave.

In some cases, the program installer used an MSI installer scrip which it parks in Doc&Settings\User\Local Settings\Temp.
During the course of cleaning out junk, if you deleted that, the Un-installer goes looking for it and when it can't find it, it won't un-install.
I have encountered these where JV16 got rid of it.

If all else fails, delete all the files and then purge any reg keys with JV16 both in registry manager and reg cleanup.

[PeteF]

Copylock, which I posted a while back, is a reliable tool to unlock files for deletion. I have used that for a few files that were locked by system applications and it works!


Don't bother searching this forum because any reference to CopyLock
is in the old archives and not currently available.

Copy lock 1.0 FREE version
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/File_Maintenance_and_Repair_Utilities/CopyLock.html

$12 to register newer version... Locked Files Wizard (LFW), formerly CopyLock
http://noeld.com/programs.asp?cat=misc

---pete---