Musings of a technophile

In a previous post, I talked about removing Symantec Endpoint Protection from your corporate network via a vbscript that ran through Group Policy. I had a problem though where I had uninstalled the program from all my computers, but I had it running on one server also.

As I went to uninstall it from the server, it asked me for the uninstall password. At this point, I had already removed the Symantec Endpoint Protection server as well, so setting the uninstall password was not possible. Although I knew what the uninstall password was, it occured to me that what would I do if I had not known it? After searching around a bit – I found the solution.

First, go ahead and uninstall Symantec Endpoint Protection via the Add/Remove Programs. When the Uninstall password box comes up, right click on your task bar and open “Task Manager”. Go to the processes tab and look for msiexec.exe. There is probably more than one of them – one of them is for the password box. Just go ahead and pick one, and hopefully it will be for the password box (if not just reatrt the uninstall process). Once you kill the password box, the uninstall will continue as normal.

Of course, one wonders how “secure” the uninstall password really is since it can be “hacked” so easily.