Unable to uninstall Norton Security Scan
Seriously, this is pretty annoying. All the sudden I found Norton Security Scan on my Notebook (Vista Business 32Bit) and am able to deinstall it. It does come back after each reboot. That is no Antivirus Software anymore and deletes Norton of my list of trusted Software vendors. This is truly annoying as well as concerning. I am afraid this could be some kind of virus hidden in these files.
But I won’t stand that and therefore hope to find a way to get rid of it. And I gonna record the steps here that lead to success. Let’s get started with looking at Nortons Homepage. Nothing on the homepage about this misterious behaviour. Support? Nope. Search? Nope. Ok, so they are doing this on purpose? Seems so. Well, let’s google for a solution. First post search for “norton security scan vista can’t deinstall” looks promising: Unable to Uninstall Norton Security Scan – Something’s Broken.
Well, that’s exactly my problem. And some links to solutions. Let’s start with getting rid of the job that does reinstall at each boot. Go to C:\Windows\Tasks. I found a file “Norton Security Scan for daniel.job”. Delete it. And then deinstall Norton again. And restart to see if we were successful.
Not too shabby for just a quick guess it might only be this bloody job. Restarted an no Norton Security Scan on the Desktop. Well, let’s hope that really was it. But seems so. Still, where did it come from and was it supposed to work that way? Don’t like it…
Update: Bugger that. It’s back. So, gonna have to follow one of the other posts. Will get back with hopefully better news soon.
Update #2: Fixed it. Following the instructions in the above linked Google Groups discussion I was able to get rid of it without touching the registry by deleting the Norton files and folder in USERNAME/AppData/Local/Temp. Additionally disable the Task “Norton Security Scan for daniel” via “Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Task Scheduler”. I did set it to disabled. Voila!
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By Brad, January 27, 2009 @ 6:48 am
How frustrating! Most uninstall files always leave just a little bit of the original program behind – and this may be causing a problem for you. It can be very difficult to remove these manually, and sometimes a good uninstall program will fix this. Best of luck.
By Dave Hickerson, March 5, 2009 @ 3:39 am
I have the same problem. I will never buy a Symantic product again.
By Dave Hickerson, March 5, 2009 @ 3:40 am
BTW, I think these are the executive email address:
‘john.w.thompson@symantec.com’; ‘john.thompson@symantec.com’; ‘james.beer@symantec.com’; ‘ken.berryman@symantec.com’; ‘rebecca.rannigner@symantec.com’; ‘enrique.salem@symantec.com’; ‘scott.taylor@symantec.com’
Let them know how you feel.