Last week when I reformatted my laptop for the 6 billionth time I installed Vista RC2 – it must be ready to ship soon…. After less than an hour I had a clean install running Media Center so that I could once again kick back and watch TV. However, this wasn’t the end of the road. When Vista boots up the Security Center flags that there is no virus scanner installed. You can easily navigate to the Microsoft site where they have a number of virus scanners available for download (they are all in beta at the moment until Vista ships). Having previously followed this road with Pc-cillin on a previous build I figured it would be a pretty safe bet, so I went with that.
A couple of days later and I get an email inviting me to participate in the beta for OneCare, Microsoft’s entry into the Virus scanning/firewalling/backup etc. From here things started to go bad – I went to uninstall Trend and completely forgot that it was a beta. Instead of taking the safe option and uninstalling using “Run as Administrator,” I instead opted to just uninstall the product. Unfortunately it crashed mid way through leaving the system with chunks of Trend stuck all over the walls. Not only could I no longer remove the product (despite it appearing in the installed Programs list), I couldn’t even reinstall it (since it thinks it is already installed). Of course there is no “repair” option on this installer – there is a reason why all good installers have a repair option!
Anyhow I thought that perhaps installing OneCare would clear out Trend. Nope, it just made matters worse as it identifies Trend as a potential security threat. To prevent further damage I uninstalled OneCare and tried a number of things to remove Trend. In the end I had to run regedit and remove all keys associated with Trend (a painful 1 hour + process). I then rebooted and still the Security Center things Trend is installed. Luckily I was able to reinstall Trend so that the system was at least stable. Then, using “Run as Administrator” I proceeded to uninstall Trend.
Finally, after all this I was able to successfully install the OneCare beta – which went on without a hitch and is running quite smoothly in the background.