If it comes down to it (and you choose to), I see two options to forcing that software out:
- 3rd party uninstallers
- Removing it yourself by hand
In either case, the absolute first requirement is creating a disk image full backup (I trust
Acronis True Image Home). Be sure to create the Emergency Recovery CD (so you can always backup/restore from a bootable CD if you lose the disk completely). Acronis also gives you a 15day free trial use.
3rd party Uninstallers
I see some 3rd party products which
claim they can remove your apps. If you want to explore this route, I can provide a few comments on what I’d look for/look out for with such a product (no personal experience with these things, sorry)
- I’d only use freeware or something that offered a free trial usage. Don’t pay a penny till you know it’s something that can help
- Be sure to search for “reviews” and “ratings” to see if you can find honest opinion by others about this product
- Don’t download/use products found on “just any” website as you don’t know ALL of what you’re really downloading
- You could search more trusted sites like CNET and MajorGeeks.com
- Many of these uninstallers are going to start with the same information that’s already there for Add/Remove Programs. If that data is corrupted to begin with (and that’s the source of your problem) many uninstallers may have the exact same problem.
Hand Removal
I think this options requires a good set of tools (I’ll offer some below, am sure people can also recommend others) and deciding on the approach (which you might want to explore in this forum to get everyone’s input).
The critical areas to tackle are your startups, services and drivers and, of course, the registry
- Get a snap shot of what’s running while in safe mode
- Run Process Explorer to save a text file snapshot of all the processes you have running
- Run Serviwin to save a snapshot of all the services and drivers (I like to save my Serviwin output into Excel to easily sort / search / manipulate the data once I have it)
- Get another snapshot but this time configure CA Internet Security not to start on reboot
- I’m assuming you can tell CA not to start/run?
- Unplug from the Internet. Reboot and repeat the snapshots above to see what’s not running and what services/drivers might be different.
- Determine how to prevent CA Internet Security from starting by changing your startups (rather then changing CA itself)
- Plug internet back. Let CA start normally on reboot.
- Use Autoruns. When it starts, note its status in lower left corner. Hit Esc to stop the scan. Now click Options and then Hide Microsoft Entries and Verify Code Signatures. Then File->Refresh to scan
- You should now have a list of all startups (without all the Microsoft clutter) AND an indication of code signatures. This should help identify all CA startups (processes as well as services/drivers)
- Using Autoruns, you can check any item to prevent it from starting on next boot. Uncheck all the CA stuff. Reboot. Take snapshots and see how they compare to the ones where CA was simply turned off.
- I think it should be clear just what needs to be prevented/turned off to keep CA from running at this point. From here on, it’s a matter of:
- Modify your startups to make those Autorun changes permanent
- Remove the files those startups were using
- Run a registry cleaner
- Now it’s a matter of continuing the cleanup
- Remove the obvious CA directories and files. (Remember, there’s no need to be “overly” aggressive in removing things right away)
- Re-run the registry cleaner regularly
Other tools you’ll probably also find helpful
- RegShot (Provide a diff between two snapshots of your registry)
- CSDiff (Provides diff to see what files are different between directories)