Lately, I’ve been ripping out and replacing antivirus software in the Enterprise. Funny thing is, most of these types of software do not have a remote uninstall utility. Being the famously lazy admin I am, I had no interest in logging into each workstation, and manually removing it.

Instead, I used psexec. It’s just one command in an awesome toolset written by Mark Russinovich called Pstools. So, I saved the following as a batch file, and executed it against all domain workstations. Here’s the contents of the symantec_removal.bat file:


REM save this as c:symantec_removal.bat
@reg add HKLMSOFTWAREIntelLANDeskVirusProtect6CurrentVersionAdministratorOnlySecurity /v UseVPUninstallPassword /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
@reg add HKLMSOFTWAREIntelLANDeskVirusProtect6CurrentVersionAdministratorOnlySecurity /v LockUnloadServices /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
msiexec /norestart /qn /x{46B63F23-2B4A-4525-A827-688026BE5E40}


Then, just install pstools into your PATH, and open a command prompt on the server, and do this:

psexec \* -c c:symantec_removal.bat

You’ll notice that the msiexec command has a GUID, so if your version of Symantec is different than mine, you’ll need the correct GUID for your version. This can be found here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Just look through the GUIDs located here until you find your version of Symantec. Then, just replace {46B63F23-2B4A-4525-A827-688026BE5E40} with the GUID found in your registry.

BTW – The first 2 lines in that batch file are for removing the uninstaller password from symantec antivirus. If you don’t use an uninstall password, you can remove them.

I wrote (swiped and altered) this script to check for a Symantec Uninstaller password. You might notice that it’s very similar to the Remote Desktop script I posted a while back. Still it works, and saves some time, so here it is:

symantec_uninstall_password_checker.bat