Recently, I was pushing out an upgrade to Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) when I came across an issue with a machine that caused the upgrade to fail, though I don’t believe it was caused by the upgrade itself. Basically, the older version of SEP didn’t quite uninstall completely and the new version of SEP didn’t quite install completely. There was just enough stuff broken in SEP so that it was effectively useless. Virus definitions were not downloading and active scan was simply not functioning. The easiest way to resolve this problem, naturally, is to uninstall both versions and reinstall.
Unfortunately, the uninstall failed with a “fatal error”. At this point, I could’ve gone to CleanWipe and had it remove SEP completely for me, but I’ve had instances where CleanWipe doesn’t get rid of all the registry keys and a new install will fail. Below are two links for the manual uninstall document for SEP. [more]
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH102261 – How to manually uninstall Symantec Endpoint Protection client from Windows 2000, XP and 2003, 32-bit Editions
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH102286 – How to manually uninstall Symantec Endpoint Protection client from Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 2008 32-bit
It’s a long document, but it will effectively let you remove all traces of SEP from your PC.