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Damn I’m tired of complaining about Eset. I just want to get rid of it from all of my clients so I never have to speak of it again - except to warn others to stay far, far away from Eset.

So here is the latest in my personal Eset hell… After removing Eset from 2 client machines yesterday because it was blocking the use of the CTRL-ALT-DEL button in the LogMeIn client from the host PC that was running Eset and it was blocking an accountant from going to QuickBooks online and taking care of her clients, I decided to remove Eset from ALL of my clients’ PCs.

On this past Sunday, I had installed Eset Antivirus on a new PC. I decided to start there.

I uninstalled Eset using its uninstaller, and proceeded to install Kaspersky Total Protection…only Kaspersky said that Eset was still installed and that it would remove Eset but the PC needed to be rebooted.

So I rebooted and tried again with the same message from Kaspersky Total Protection about Eset being installed and I needed to reboot to remove it.

I rebooted again.

Same thing happened when I rebooted. So I downloaded Eset’s AV Removal Tool and ran it as administrator. Only it showed no Eset products to remove.

So, desperate to be rid of Eset, I thought I’d re-install and then uninstall again.

But, now Eset will not install because it says it is already installed.

So I go find Eset directories (empty directories) in Program Files and Program Common and delete them. I find the system registry littered with Eset entries and I ran the registry cleaning tool in Advanced Systemcare to get rid of them.

I restarted only to have Kaspersky tell me that Eset was still installed, the Eset AV Removal Tool still showed no Eset and Eset still would not install because it says it is installed.

I have tried everything I know to remedy the situation to no avail.

Has anyone else got trapped in Eset’s 9th level of hell and escaped?

2 Spice ups
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You know those Eset registry keys you found? Delete them. Delete them all. You’ll probably need to do it manually, though, as none of the automated tools you’ve used seem to be working.

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Try looking at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\PendingFileRenameOperations and see if anything is stuck in there and clear it if need be.

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I spent over an hour going through the registry manually deleting anything with Eset in it.

Do you know how many words in the system registry contain the series of characters “eset”? A whole damned lot of 'em! Using RegScanner I found 9,954 on my machine!

There has to be a better way to search the registry than with Find in regedit or RegScanner…

I need something that I can scan using regular expressions so I don’t get every “preset”, “featureset” and eset in the registry.

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Found a way to get rid of Eset!

Went to this Kaspersky page and followed method #2.

Hope it helps somebody else.

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Make sure you mark yourself as best answer! You won’t get any points for doing so, but it’ll help the next person find the answer quicker.

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